


Set Theory

by Anonymous



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: AI Peter Parker, Angst, Artificial Intelligence, Canon Divergence - Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Identity Issues, M/M, Post-Endgame
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-22
Updated: 2020-05-18
Packaged: 2020-07-10 11:22:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 45,235
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19904914
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: "What the f-""Don't freak out! I'm not like, an evil clone or anything, I swear."Peter doesn't relax in the least. The guy standing in front of him iswearing his face. This is not the kind of situation where relaxing seems like an appropriate response."That's definitely something an evil clone would say, just so you know," Peter says.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> A continuation of [Archetype](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19853638), set several months after the snap has been undone. 
> 
> The broad strokes of Endgame remain the same except Tony lives, and the Blip only lasts two years.

"What the f - "

"Don't freak out! I'm not like, an evil clone or anything, I swear."

Peter doesn't relax in the least. The guy standing in front of him is _wearing his face_. This is not the kind of situation where relaxing seems like an appropriate response. 

"That's definitely something an evil clone would say, just so you know," Peter says.

"But I'm not! I swear I'm not."

The guy’s suit looks a lot like Peter’s, except it’s yellow and black instead of red and blue. Peter’s seen him around - never in person, since they generally stuck to different parts of the city, but on the news and stuff.

And never without the mask before, obviously.

But today Peter had chased a purse-snatching drone over the Williamsburg Bridge into Manhattan. At present, said drone was scattered in pieces across the rooftop, after a messy near-threeway collision between it, Peter, and possibly-a-clone yellow-suit guy.

"Okay... so is this another time travel travel thing?” Peter asks. “Did Mr. Stark send you back in time to fix something bad that’s gonna happen?"

Dammit, he hadn't meant that to come out sounding excited. 

Then again, if Mr. Stark sent him back from the future, it couldn't be that far in the future, Peter thinks. The version of Peter standing in front of him looks pretty much exactly the same as Peter does now. His hair is a little shorter, and the suit is different, but otherwise it's like looking in a mirror.

A really creepy, weird mirror.

"It's not a time travel thing. Sorry. That would be awesome though. It's not a multiverse thing either, if that's the next thing you were gonna ask." (It was.) "I'm, um. It's kinda hard to explain, actually?"

Peter is about two seconds away from calling Mr. Stark - he’ll definitely be able to figure out what's going on here. But some part of Peter is incredibly curious to hear what the guy has to say. Because if it's not time travel thing, and not a multiverse or a clone thing, Peter is kind of out of ideas. 

Unless this new guy is lying, that is. 

"Try harder.”

Other-Peter takes a deep breath, blowing it out through his mouth. "Okay. Okay, so - remember how you were kind of dead for two years?"

"I don't actually remember it, but yeah. It's kinda hard to miss."

"Tony didn't really... cope well with that."

Peter frowns. That seems kind of obvious. Half of all life in the _universe_ had been snapped out of existence. Peter's seen the tributes, the books, the memorials. Hell, the cascading sociopolitical and environmental impacts of the Snap were covered in his social studies and life sciences classes these days. 

In any case, Peter kind of doubts anyone who'd been left behind during that time had been able to deal with it particularly well; Mr. Stark probably least of all, since he'd been right there, so close to stopping it.

Peter could remember all too well the look on Mr. Stark's face when the reality of their failure had set in. Mr. Stark had been on the ground, bleeding, half his suit destroyed by going head to head with Thanos while the rest of them scrambled just to survive.

Thanos had already vanished from the planet, but the prickle of fear Peter could feel racing across his skin had only intensified, second by second. Peter shivers, remembering.

"But he fixed it," Peter says, forcing himself back to the present.

"Well yeah, eventually. But for a long time fixing it didn't even seem possible. Thanos was dead, and the stones were destroyed. There were two whole years where nobody thought it could be undone."

"I get that, but none of this is explaining who you are or why you're here."

"It is actually, you're just being kind of slow on the uptake - no offense. Tony had all this stuff on you - biometric scans, DNA samples, a ton of video and audio recordings from all the time you spent in the suit." Other-Peter pauses, swallowing. "He was a mess, when he first came back. Like, really a mess. And he really, really missed you."

"Oh my god, you're a robot. Mr. Stark made a _robot-me_?"

Other-Peter grimaces. "No! No, I'm not that either. I'm - I mean, my thought processes are based on some pretty advanced AI stuff that Tony developed, like, specifically for me. But I'm all biological," he says, gesturing vaguely to a small cut on his forehead. It was already healing, but a pinkie-sized smear of blood was clearly visible.

Other-Peter had mentioned something about DNA samples. It would explain the wall-crawling and the super-strength - not that Peter doubted Mr. Stark could design a robot with those same abilities, if he really wanted. 

"So you sort of are a clone then."

Other-Peter shakes his head. "If he'd just made a clone, then I'd still be a baby, right? He _printed_ me, using a prototype of the regeneration cradle Dr. Cho designed and built a few years ago."

"No way." 

Peter reaches out, fingertips brushing against the shoulder of Other-Peter's suit before he realizes what he's doing and yanks his hand back. 

"Sorry. That's just, that's really cool."

Other-Peter grins. "I know, right?"

But doubt starts to creep in once again. "How - how many other people did he bring back like that? During those two years?"

"Just you. I mean me, I guess."

Peter probably shouldn't let himself be convinced this easily. It could still all be a big lie. It does sound just a little bit too good to be true - why would Mr. Stark go through all that trouble just to recreate _Peter_ , of all the people they'd lost? 

Sure, he knew Mr. Stark cared about him, but he had plenty of other people he cared about too. Plenty of other people were way more important to bring back, like King T'Challa, for one. Or any number of the other world leaders who'd vanished, really.

But maybe Peter's not taking the practicalities of doing that into account. 

Sure, there was plenty of footage of King T'Challa in the news, especially after his coronation and the subsequent opening of Wakanda up to the outside world - the media had gone (understandably) nuts covering that story. But even so, it's not like Mr. Stark would have access to the sheer volume of footage for King T’Challa that he must've had of Peter. Peter does a quick estimate on the number of hours he's spent in the suit since Mr. Stark first gave it to him, plus all the hours he spent just talking to Karen or doing... other things.

Oh god. 

Mr. Stark probably didn't look at that footage, right? 

No, of course not. He had way more important things to do than comb through all that video. He probably just created a base AI structure and then pre-loaded all the video and audio files on there. Peter shutters the thought, but can't quite help the blush he can feel heating up his cheeks.

Which of course, Other-Peter seems to notice, if the brief flicker of a grin on his face is anything to go by.

He seems to take pity on Peter though, because he doesn’t actually bring it up out loud.

"Yeah, I mean maybe it would've made sense to bring back other people like that - but he didn't have the raw material he would've needed to do it. Not for anyone other than you, really."

It's a little bit creepy how easily Other-Peter seems to read his thoughts. Or maybe it's not even about that. Maybe all he has to do is put himself in Peter's place and try to figure out how he would react, if he were Peter. Which he is. 

Kind of.

Yeah, this is definitely going to give Peter a headache.

"If I asked Karen to call Mr. Stark right now, would he tell me all the same stuff you just said?" Peter asks.

"He would. But uhh, please don't do that? I'm not technically supposed to be telling you any of this. Or interacting with you at all, actually. He was kind of trying to prevent you having to deal with any of this stuff. He didn’t want to freak you out."

Peter's heart sinks, and he can't immediately put a finger on why. 

Sure, he and Mr. Stark had gotten pretty close in the couple years after the whole Vulture thing. They'd spent a lot of time together in the lab, turning Peter's "internship" into an actual internship, at May's insistence. 

Mr. Stark let Peter work on his suit, and mess around with tech that Midtown's science department would never be able to afford, and in return Mr. Stark occasionally asked him to make a fresh pot of coffee or hold something in place if it was too delicate for DUM-E to handle. 

It'd been pretty great. 

But then that crazy spaceship had appeared over Manhattan, and they'd ended up on Titan, ...and they’d lost. 

And Peter had clung to Mr. Stark in those last moments, begging and crying like a little kid to make it stop as he'd felt himself fading away, piece by piece. 

The next time he'd opened his eyes, Mr. Stark was gone and Doctor Strange had been in his place, pulling Peter upright and telling him they needed to move, _now_.

The battle that followed had been chaotic, and terrifying, and Peter had spent most of it wondering in a vaguely panicked way if he should even really be there at all. He wasn't some supersoldier, or magician, or Norse god; he was just a kid. 

Mr. Stark must’ve had the same thought, at some point, because he stopped spending as much time with Peter, afterward.

At first he'd thought the man was just busy. Mr. Stark had all that rebuilding to do, after all, and a ton of other problems to deal with - half the world's population had vanished for two years and then reappeared just as suddenly; power grids and water supply systems were overloaded. 

A lot of people came back to find they didn't even have a place to live anymore, Peter and May among them. Mr. Stark had made sure they got a new place, but he’d done it from a distance; through employees and short, almost business-like emails to Aunt May. 

It had felt good, to know that Mr. Stark was still watching out for him, even as busy as he was. 

But it was hard not to think of it in another light too - that even after everything they’d been through together, Mr. Stark still thought of him as just a kid. Just one more of those problems he had to tick off a list - not a fellow Avenger, regardless of what he’d said to Peter on the ship.

If Mr. Stark thought of him as - well, maybe not as an equal, but at least as a sort of lesser partner - then he wouldn’t have felt like he needed to hide this Other-Peter from him, right?

“I’m not freaking out,” Peter says, even though he is. Other-Peter raises an eyebrow at him. It’s a familiar enough expression; he definitely picked that up from Mr. Stark. “Okay, maybe I am. I think it’s a little justified though. This is really weird, dude.”

“Oh it’s definitely weird,” Other-Peter agrees. 

And suddenly Peter can see it in his expression - this other version of Peter may know more about what’s going on than Peter does, but he’s just as freaked out as Peter is, coming face to face with his doppelganger. Freaked out and more than just a little bit fascinated.

Peter grins. “ _Super_ weird.”

It’s not like Other-Peter is a completely unknown quantity, he figures. Peter’s seen the guy in the black and yellow suit in plenty of news reports over the past few months - he does the same kind of stuff that Peter does on patrol, helping people out. Friendly neighborhood stuff. 

Peter just hadn’t realized they had a whole lot more than that in common until today.

“So wait, if you’re me - I mean, did Mr. Stark set you up with an apartment somewhere or something? And a fake name too?”

“That’s a yes on the fake name, no on the apartment though. Legally speaking, my name is Pete Reilly, although I’m still not really used to using it, to be honest. But I live in the tower with Tony.”

Peter gapes. “ _You live with Mr. Stark?_ ”

“Yeah?”

Peter takes a deep breath, tries to remind himself that the wave of jealousy that overcomes him in that moment probably isn’t super great. Besides, it’s not like he wants to live anywhere that isn’t with May anyway, and he’s pretty sure she would hate living at the tower - she’d been iffy enough about accepting the apartment Mr. Stark had set up for them.

But still, he couldn’t deny that he was achingly curious about what it must be like. Sure, he’s been to Mr. Stark’s private lab a bunch of times, but he’s never actually been up to the penthouse.

The _penthouse_. Where Other-Peter, or Pete, lives. With Mr. Stark.

“You have to show me. That’s my deal - I won’t say anything to Mr. Stark about knowing you exist, but you _have_ to show what living in the penthouse is like.”

“Okay,” Pete agrees readily, which, when Peter stops to think about it for a second makes perfect sense. If Peter lived in Mr. Stark’s private penthouse suite, he would _definitely_ want to share that with someone. 

“Tony's down in DC today anyway. We can’t both swing up there though, it’d be too obvious,” Pete says. “How about this - change into your street clothes and go up to the lab. I’ll meet you there and take you up.”

That suggestion more than anything else convinces Peter that Pete must be telling the truth - because when Peter gets to the lab fifteen minutes later, FRIDAY grants Pete access upstairs with a warm welcome, even shuts off the interior surveillance systems at his request before he gestures Peter inside. 

If FRIDAY allows Pete that kind of access, then that means Mr. Stark must trust him pretty implicitly.

Peter does his best to pretend that it doesn’t sting; knowing that Mr. Stark trusts Pete that much when he clearly doesn’t think of Peter the same way, even if they are supposed to be the same person. 

After all, Peter wasn’t around during those two years, and maybe that’s all it is - Peter hadn’t been there, and Mr. Stark had grown close to someone else.

That the someone else just so happened to look like Peter was sort of weirdly irrelevant, somehow.

*

Mr. Stark’s penthouse is - there’s no other way to describe it, it’s insane. 

Sure, Peter’s seen parts of the place in pictures in magazines and articles online (he’s not a stalker or anything, he was just curious, really), but none of those really capture the experience of actually being there. The panoramic view out the floor to ceiling windows is breathtaking; even to Peter, who’s spent time perched on practically every skyscraper in the city. 

There’s a pretty big difference between crouching on a precarious rooftop ledge and lounging on a plush designer couch that Peter can only assume costs more than a year of tuition at NYU, after all. 

It even _smells_ expensive.

“Woah.”

“Right? I mean, it looks loads better now than it did the first time I was up here. The place was all empty and like, kinda creepy almost? They’d been in the process of moving everything out, so we barely had any furniture, just a couple beds and a couch.”

Someone had clearly fixed that at some point, though. 

Peter wanders over to the immaculate-looking kitchen first, tracing his fingertips over the marble countertop of the island. He opens the fridge to peer inside, then closes it, blushing. “Sorry,” he says.

Pete shrugs. “I’d probably do the same thing, if I were you.”

Oh. Right. Peter’s not sure how he keeps forgetting that of course Pete, of all people, is going to understand his burning curiosity.

Pete turns out to be a pretty great tour guide, showing Peter around the living area, then down the hall to a small but very comfortable looking media room, which they both spend some time geeking out over together. 

One level down there’s a lap pool and a separate gym, with a boxing ring and free weights, complete with a sauna and showers tucked off to one side.

“Does Mr. Stark spend a lot of time in here?” Peter asks, trailing one hand through the water of a jacuzzi, idly picturing him leaning back in the water, with his eyes closed.

“Not really. He spends a lot of time working. I usually only see him at night, or sometimes first thing in the morning if I’m up early enough.”

“Oh.”

“Wanna go in?”

Peter shakes his head. He shouldn’t; May will be expecting him home soon anyway. 

“Hey, what about your room?” he asks instead.

“Uh, yeah. It’s just a bedroom though, nothing special.”

“A bedroom in _Stark tower_ , dude. C’mon, don’t pretend you don’t know how cool that is. Besides, you have to show me, a deal is a deal.”

But Pete turns out to be right - mostly. The room has incredible views of the city, to be sure, but just stepping inside makes Peter feel hollowed out and disappointed in a way he can’t explain. 

There’s nothing in the room that’s really personal. No posters on the walls or photos tucked into the frame of the mirror, no dirty clothes on the floor. Peter guesses maybe Mr. Stark just prefers Pete to keep things neat. He probably has like, housekeepers or staff to keep everything clean and tidy. Although maybe not - Mr. Stark is pretty strict about security, after all.

As cool as the penthouse is, Peter would hate to live here, like he was a guest in someone else’s home.

Peter turns away, not wanting what he’s thinking to show on his face, since Pete seems to be pretty good at picking up on that stuff. He fiddles with the handle of the dresser, pulling it open just for something to do.

“Don’t - !” Pete starts, but it’s too late.

Peter is already staring down into the drawer. The empty drawer. He closes it and opens the next one down, which is equally empty.

“This isn’t your room, is it?” he says, shifting so he can see Pete in the mirror’s reflection.

“Oh I’m so dead,” Pete mutters, eyes wide.

“Why did you lie?” 

Peter’s thoughts are racing. FRIDAY allowed him access, sure, but FRIDAY wasn’t infallible. Maybe she'd been hacked. Or this really was some kind of time travel multiverse thing. If Pete didn’t actually live here - 

“I didn’t lie!” Pete insists. “I just - maybe didn’t tell you the entire truth? I do live here, but I uh, I can’t show you my room.”

Peter turns around to face him. 

“Why not?”

Pete winces. “It’s… personal?”

“If what you said about Mr. Stark creating you is really true, then you have a ton of my life downloaded in your head, including some pretty private stuff I may or may not have done while wearing my mask - ” Peter clocks the flicker of an expression across Pete’s face that basically confirms yeah, at least a few of his mask-assisted masturbatory sessions must have been included in there, “so I don’t think you’re the one who gets to decide what’s too personal to share, here.”

Pete purses his lips, then gives Peter a short nod. 

He looks conflicted about it, but at least he hasn’t started villain-monologuing yet, which Peter takes as a good sign. Peter holds out hope that maybe there really is a perfectly good explanation for the subterfuge.

Pete leads him down the hall, back through the living area and over to a separate wing of the penthouse. Up a half-flight of stairs, Pete pushes open a door and gestures Peter inside without a word.

This room is bigger. A lot bigger. It also has plenty of personal touches - no posters on the walls, but plenty of knick knacks scattered around on the dresser. The sheets are rumpled, and there’s a pair of jeans on the floor next to the bed. There’s a couple of books and a tablet on the nightstand.

There are tablets on both nightstands, actually. Peter stands in the doorway, blinking dumbly at the room in front of him, trying to make sense of it.

The bed is really big.

There are indents on two of the pillows.

Peter takes a step further into the room without meaning to, drawn forwards by the sight.

The room is nice; really, really nice. It’s the sort of room he’d always pictured, whenever he’d thought about Mr. Stark in bed.

“I - I don’t,” he says.

Peter looks back over his shoulder to see Pete behind him, slouched against the doorframe with an almost apologetic look on his face, chewing on his bottom lip.

“This is Mr. Stark’s room,” Peter says. It’s not really a question. 

It even smells like Mr. Stark in here.

“Yeah.”

“And it’s your room,” he adds, feeling numb.

“...Yeah.”

“You sleep in Mr. Stark’s bed.” Still not a question. Peter has no idea why he has to keep verbalizing the same thing over and over again. Maybe until it actually sinks in.

“Technically it’s our bed, but, yes.”

“Oh my god.”

“See, I knew this was gonna freak you out. For the record, I was trying to avoid throwing all of this at you all at once like this. But then you were all, _you have to show me the penthouse_ and _a deal is a deal_. I should’ve just let you call Tony in the first place,” Pete pauses to swear under his breath. “He’s gonna kill me if he finds out about this. I’m so dead.”

Peter tries not to picture it - not Mr. Stark finding out, but Mr. Stark and Pete stretched out in bed together. In this bed. The one he’s looking at right now.

Now that he’s focusing on it, he can actually smell Pete on the sheets too; both of them mixed together. 

He tries not to imagine what that must feel like, waking up to Mr. Stark’s hands in his hair, or rubbing his back.

He doesn’t succeed. 

He does, technically, know what that feels like - to have Mr. Stark holding him like that. Sort of. He’s felt it twice now - once on Titan, crying and begging for his life, and the second time mid-battle, both of them bloodied and jittery with adrenaline, the fate of the entire universe hanging in the balance. 

Moments later, the entire battlefield around him had erupted in fire and explosions.

Peter sits down abruptly, his breath going rapid and shallow and out of his control. 

He digs his fingers into the carpet, trying to let the sensation of it overwhelm the panic. Pete is there a split-second later, his hands on Peter’s shoulders, his forehead pressed against Peter’s own. 

Peter looks up only to find his own panic perfectly mirrored in Pete’s face. He clenches his eyes shut, and goes with it when Pete pulls him forward into a crushing hug.

“It’s okay, it’s okay. _Shit_. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to freak you out with all this stuff, I swear. It’s okay,” Pete is muttering to him over and over, stroking his hair.

The panic starts to recede, just like it always does. Quicker than he expects when it first starts - when it feels like it might go on forever, but still fading far too slow.

It’s been a while since he’s had one that bad.

Pete being there helps a lot, actually. 

“Sorry,” he mumbles into Pete’s shoulder.

“Don’t be sorry,” Pete says. “You’ve got nothing to be sorry for. I get them too, sometimes.”

It doesn’t make Peter feel better, exactly, but it does make him feel like less of an idiot.

“Were you there that day? When Nebula - ”

“Yeah. Tony wanted me to stay out of it, but when Doctor Strange sent out the call for help it’s not like I was gonna say no.”

Peter doesn’t remember seeing him there, but he’s not entirely surprised. It really had been chaos. 

“Have you - you know, talked to anyone about this stuff?” Pete asks.

Peter shakes his head. “It’d just freak May out, and she’s already scared enough about the Spider-Man stuff. I told Ned a little bit, but he’d freak too if he knew about all of it. How close it really was.”

“You can talk to me, if you want.”

Peter shifts back, looking up. It should be weird. It _is_ weird. 

But it’s also kind of nice, knowing that he's not alone. There's someone else out there who gets it, understands what it's like. The way he used to think he and Mr. Stark might understand each other.

“Thanks, man.” He means it. 

“Don’t mention it. I figure we’re kind of like a team, right? Or we could be.”

“Uh huh, yeah,” Peter says, distracted. 

Now that he’s a little steadier, he can’t stop staring at the pair of jeans on the floor just a few feet away. He can’t tell what size they are, but it doesn’t really matter who they belong to, does it? One or the other of the two had kicked them off yesterday, or maybe the day before, and crawled into bed.

Peter swallows. He’s not going to think about what they might have done next. 

It’s insane, possibly more so than anything else he’s heard or seen today. And worse, it stung. Mr. Stark barely even looks at him these days, even on the rare occasions they’re both in the lab at the same time. He thinks about Mr. Stark ducking out of the lab early or brushing him off entirely so he can go upstairs to spend time with this other version of Peter. The one he must like better.

“I should probably be getting home,” Peter says. “May’s gonna start wondering where I am.”

Pete hums in agreement, standing up and offering Peter a hand. They head back down to the lab in silence. 

Peter grabs his backpack, slinging it over his shoulder and shoving his hands in his pockets.

“I guess I’ll see you around?” he says.

“Not if I see you first,” Pete answers with a grin, waving as the elevator doors slide closed.  



	2. Chapter 2

Peter doesn’t stop thinking about it the whole way home. 

He eats dinner with May, does his homework, contemplates going back out on patrol, and the whole time the knowledge sits heavy in the back of his mind like a black hole; drawing everything in. 

He doesn’t go out on patrol that night. He’s too distracted.

Peter wonders how it started - if things were like that from the very beginning, if Pete stepped out of the regeneration cradle and right into Mr. Stark’s arms and just, never had to step back out again the way Peter has had to, every time.

He wonders how often they kiss, if Mr. Stark ever leans down over the breakfast bar to press his lips against Pete’s before he leaves for the day. He runs through every word Pete said over and over, trying to tease out meaning from the smallest of hints.

_I usually only see him at night. Or sometimes first thing in the morning, if I’m up early enough._

And yeah, that makes sense. Mr. Stark probably works late. He probably comes in after Pete is already asleep, or at least is already in bed. Peter wonders if Mr. Stark wakes Pete up when he does, or if he just slides into bed without disturbing him. 

Peter wonders what that would feel like, to roll over half-awake in the middle of the night and feel Mr. Stark breathing next to him.

He wonders if Pete would tell him, if he asked.

Probably not, he decides. 

Pete had seemed pretty eager to talk about everything else, like he’d been wanting Peter to understand - to know how he existed, and why. But he’d tried to lie about where he slept at night, and he hadn’t exactly been forthcoming even after Peter had learned the truth.

Then again, Peter’s pretty sure that if he were the one lucky enough to be sleeping with Mr. Stark, he would _definitely_ want to talk to someone about it.

Maybe that’s why Mr. Stark likes Pete better, though.

Peter rolls over in his bed, pressing his face down into the pillow. He wants to yell, to let his frustrations leach out into the air of his bedroom - but May is asleep right next door, and he doesn’t want to risk waking her.

Maybe he can just… take the edge off in a different way.

He rolls onto his back with a sigh. 

It’s probably pathetic, he thinks, one hand snaking down into his boxers to wrap around his dick, using the memory of those scant few minutes he’d spent standing in Mr. Stark’s bedroom for this. Here, in his tiny bedroom. 

In the apartment that Mr. Stark had helped them get, all without a word to Peter.

Tears prickle at the corners of his eyes, and he wipes the back of his hand across his face. Yeah, it sucks, but he’s not going to freaking cry about it while he’s jerking himself off. He’s not that pathetic.

He closes his eyes, tries to imagine himself stretched out on top of the rumpled sheets he’d seen that afternoon. 

They’d looked so soft. They’d looked _expensive_. 

Which made sense; of course it did. Mr. Stark could afford to sleep on whatever he wanted, and he probably didn’t get enough sleep as it was, so of course he would spare no expense. Sleeping in that bed probably felt like sleeping on a cloud. Peter briefly regrets not seizing the opportunity to touch the sheets while he’d been there. It would’ve been a weird thing to do, sure, but he’s not sure if he’ll ever get the chance again.

That’s okay, he has a pretty good imagination.

He imagines Mr. Stark walking into the room, catching him going at it, and has to bite down on a moan. He slaps his other hand over his mouth. Imagines Mr. Stark sitting down on the bed next to him - the way he’d done in that first apartment, back before everything.

Mr. Stark’s hands would have a few calluses, but overall they’d be soft as silk. And strong. Not strong in the same way that Peter’s hands were strong, he thinks, shivering at an especially long, firm pull; no, but his hands would be sturdy. Or maybe sturdy wasn’t the right word, either. 

They were made for building things, that’s what he meant. For taking all the fantastical designs and ideas from Mr. Stark’s once-in-a-lifetime mind and making them a reality.

Things like Pete, Peter thinks without meaning to, his hips jerking up off the mattress as a thick bead of precum spills out of him.

Okay, that’s, uh. Not something that’s ever done it for him before. 

He stares down at his dick in disbelief. It’s got to be bad enough that he’s jerking off to Mr. Stark ( _again_ ), but now apparently he’s got a thing for his own doppelganger.

That’s pretty messed up.

...a lot of things are messed up, though. Like missing two years of your life, or having a clone in the first place.

Besides, it’s not really himself that he’s getting off to - that thought alone isn’t enough, when he tries to get back into it. It’s not about that. 

It’s about Mr. Stark _making_ him. 

He imagines it like a sculpture, like that story they had to read last year (three years ago) in English class, even though he knows that’s not how it happened: Mr. Stark’s expert hands running over every part of his body, stroking and molding and smoothing over every last inch until he was perfect. 

Exactly what Mr. Stark wanted.

A perfect replica of _Peter_.

And that’s what does it, in the end - Peter comes with a soft moan, eyes clenched shut and heels digging into the mattress.

It takes a while to come back down. Peter shucks off his boxers, using them to wipe up as best he can before shoving them to the bottom of the hamper. While he’s doing that, he catches sight of himself in the mirror hanging on his closet door - face flushed and hair tousled from squirming around on the bed; still naked from the waist down. 

He wonders if this is what Pete looks like after Mr. Stark’s been with him.

Probably.

Peter pulls on a fresh pair of boxers and slides back into bed. 

He wonders what Mr. Stark looks like too, after, then pushes the thought aside. He’s probably never going to find out, not unless maybe Pete is willing to describe it to him. And as curious as Peter is, he’s not sure if he wants to ask. He can’t decide if it would be better or worse, to know for sure.

And maybe it’s not a sex thing at all, Peter thinks, although he’s not sure whether that’s optimism or naivety talking.

There were other reasons two people might share a bed, right? Pete had mentioned there hadn’t been much furniture in the tower, when they’d first moved back there. Maybe they’d just gotten into the habit of sharing and hadn’t thought to stop. Pete had said something about having anxiety attacks too - surely it wasn’t much of a stretch to assume that meant he also had nightmares, just like Peter does.

Peter takes a moment, now that he’s a bit calmer, to boggle at how insane it was that Mr. Stark had been able to create an AI so realistic that it - _he_ , Peter corrects himself - could actually experience anxiety in that way.

He wonders if Mr. Stark had ever considered trying to program that out. 

Peter would do it in a heartbeat, if he could - just erase the sense of rising panic he felt every time he started to remember Titan or the battle back on Earth that had come after. 

He closes his eyes and tries not to think about it. Or about how much easier it might be to sleep if he knew Mr. Stark was right there beside him, ready to soothe away the nightmares when they came.

*

The rest of the week goes on like normal; like Peter doesn’t know that just across the East River there’s another version of himself living a completely different life. He doesn’t do anything different, but he also doesn’t stop thinking about it.

When he shows up at the tower on Wednesday he finds the lab empty. It’s not surprising, really, but he’s still disappointed.

He gets to work on the latest project, a new system he and Mr. Stark had been tinkering around with to help improve transportation networks in newly hyper-crowded cities. He can tell from some of the notes and the change log that Mr. Stark has made a pretty solid amount of progress on it on his own at some point in the past week.

Peter picks up where he left off, trying out a few different things, running simulations. Three hours pass in the blink of an eye, and before he knows it it’s time to head home for dinner with May. Mr. Stark never shows up.

He knew Peter was coming by today. 

Peter comes by the tower every Wednesday for lab time - it was part of the internship deal with May, that Peter gets some actual experience doing something other than being a superhero each week. 

Peter wonders if the reason Mr. Stark didn’t come downstairs is because he had better things to do upstairs, with Pete.

“Hey FRIDAY,” he starts, and before he can think the better of it he’s asking, “is Mr. Stark here, in the tower right now?”

“Mr. Stark is currently in Geneva. Did you need me to contact him?” she offers.

“No! No, that’s okay. I don’t need anything. I was just wondering.”

Peter feels like an idiot. Of course Mr. Stark wasn’t missing Peter’s internship hours to mess around with Pete upstairs. He was thousands of miles away, probably busy advising on the development of the new planetary defense coalition the UN was trying to put together.

Peter’s tempted to ask FRIDAY if Pete is around, but decides against it. If he asks, then FRIDAY will know that Peter knows about Pete, and Pete had been pretty insistent that Mr. Stark not find out that they’d met.

A small voice in the back of Peter’s mind asks why he should care if Mr. Stark didn’t want them to know about each other. Mr. Stark is supposed to be his mentor, sure, but the man barely seems to have time for him at all these days. And even if he did have the time, that wouldn’t mean he got to decide who Peter talked to or hung out with, and the same goes for Pete.

They were basically like brothers, after all. Or they could be, if Mr. Stark hadn’t been trying to keep them apart.

He wonders though, if Pete feels the same way.

*

Peter spends most of his free time the rest of the week out patrolling. 

In the quiet moments, when he’s stuck just waiting around for something to happen, he’ll pull out his phone and scroll through the #ManhattanSpider-Man tags on Twitter, looking at photos and videos of his double.

The pics and stories make him smile. Pete is out there doing almost exactly the same things Peter does, just a few miles away - which, duh, of course he is.

He wishes for a moment that he and Pete had swapped numbers, but calling each other like that probably would just tip off Mr. Stark. Maybe they could get burner phones or something.

By the time Saturday rolls around Peter has a plan. He empties his backpack and shoves his suit and a water bottle in there instead, along with some chips and a granola bar. On second thought, he shoves his Spanish textbook back in, since he’s got a test coming up next week.

He runs into May in the kitchen on his way out.

“You look excited about something,” she says, reaching up to fix his hair.

“Yeah. Just, Saturday, you know.”

“Uh huh.”

“I was gonna go study for a little bit, and then patrol later.”

May’s hand slides down to cup his jaw, thumb stroking over his cheek. “You be careful out there, you hear me?”

“I will. I mean I am! I’m always careful,” Peter insists.

“Good.”

Peter can almost feel it, how hard she’s struggling not to tell him he can’t go. 

He knows she doesn’t like it, that she worries almost constantly. Peter would do almost anything to take that worry away… but he can’t stop being Spider-Man. 

Being out there - helping people, doing good, it’s the only thing that seems to steady him, these days. It makes the panic attacks fade a little faster, swinging around the city instead of stuck somewhere just sitting alone with those feelings.

He thinks maybe May already knows that, too.

“Have fun,” she says, letting her hand drop.

Peter grins, pulling her in for a quick hug before he heads out the door.

Instead of heading to the library or the park though, he catches the subway heading into Manhattan. He gets off a couple stops away from Stark tower, picks a building that looks like it has a nice, unused rooftop and a secluded alley for access, and climbs on up.

He settles in to wait.

His heart races a little every time he hears a far-off police siren, split between excitement that Pete might already be swinging into action and anxiety thinking that he should be putting on his own suit and going down to help, even if it means potentially clueing Mr. Stark onto his location. 

He figures Mr. Stark probably isn’t monitoring his suit data all that closely anyway, since he hadn’t noticed last time. 

Plus, Peter is pretty sure he managed to remove all the trackers.

Now all he has to do is wait for Pete to find him.

He reviews for Spanish, spends some time texting Ned, stopping every so often to scan the horizon for a familiar blur of black and yellow. He thinks he sees him, once or twice - too far away to be sure, but he sees something that definitely isn’t moving the way a bird would.

When Pete shows up though, he isn’t in the suit after all.

Peter hears him before he sees him - a shuffle of clothing in the alley below and the scuff of sneakers against the concrete. Pete’s head pops up over the ledge of the building in the same spot Peter had climbed up earlier, eyebrows raised in question.

Peter grins and waves. It seems strange, to feel like he’s missed someone he’s only met once, but that’s definitely how it feels.

Pete grins back, flipping easily over the ledge and coming over to sprawl out on the rooftop across from Peter.

“Hey,” he says.

“Hey,” Peter answers back, then realizes he has no idea what to say next.

Pete saves them both from the awkward silence by speaking up first.

“I saw a cell phone vid of you catching that construction crane. That was _awesome_.”

“Oh my god, yeah. I could hear it creaking, like, starting to go, and I didn’t think I was gonna make it there in time,” Peter says in a rush, relieved to have an opening. “I saw you save that little kid that wandered out into 5th Ave.”

Pete blows out a breath. “That was so close, dude. And then she was crying too much to even tell me her name when I got her back on the sidewalk. Her dad was like half a block away, going nuts trying to find her.”

Peter had seen video of that, too: Pete handing off the little girl to a sobbing man, awkwardly patting the man on the back while he clutched his daughter to his chest.

“Twitter went nuts over that one,” Peter says. 

Everyone was eager to latch onto the good things, these days. And these days, everyone on Earth could all-too-easily empathize with the overwhelming panic and desperation that came with a loved one disappearing without warning. 

Neither he nor Pete mentions that part of it. But one topic leads easily to another, and another.

They talk about their patrols; the stuff that makes it online in the form of pictures and videos, and the stuff that generally doesn’t. Like hours spent milling around on rooftops or stretched out on top of trains, waiting for something to happen. Or how gross it was to sneeze in the suit, on the rare occasions that a new smell would tickle their noses in just the wrong way.

They don’t talk about Mr. Stark. Peter doesn’t ask, much as some part of him is tempted to, and Pete seems to be fine with talking around the subject.

But they talk about pretty much anything and everything else - school, the tower, May’s new job, movies scheduled to come out soon, the rebuilding efforts in the city and elsewhere.

Before Peter knows it, the sun is starting to set.

“I should probably get going,” he says, regretfully.

“Yeah, me too.”

Pete looks back over his shoulder at the tower. Peter wonders what he’s looking for - maybe to see if the quinjet is parked on top or not. It isn’t. 

He turns back around to look at Peter.

“So… next Saturday?”

“Yeah! Definitely. Same place?” he asks, gesturing around at the rooftop.

Pete shrugs. “Wherever. Find a good spot, and I’ll find you,” he says with a quirk of his lips.

It’s a challenge. Peter grins back.

“Works for me. See you around, man!” He yells, swinging himself over the ledge and dropping down to the alley below.

*

Saturdays become a regular thing, after that. Peter will pack a bag and head over to Manhattan, scouting around until he finds a good perch, then settle in to wait while he tackles his homework.

He has to be careful though. If they were in their suits, probably no one would question it - but that would almost definitely tip off Mr. Stark. But in street clothes, other people might notice and be alarmed to see two teenage boys casually swinging their legs over the edge of a building, or off the support beams of the Queensboro bridge. 

So, only places that aren’t visible from neighboring buildings, or from street level. Nothing that might get caught on security cameras, either. Heights work to their advantage, there.

They spend hours side-by-side or knee-to-knee, talking, reading, scrolling through Twitter to watch videos together. When Peter is super swamped with school stuff, Pete will grudgingly ask him to hand over some of it so he can be done faster.

It’s not _cheating_. Not really, Peter tells himself.

He always makes sure he re-reads what Pete’s done, so it’s not like he’s missing out on learning the actual stuff. 

Peter had been caught by surprise when he’d realized that Pete didn’t go to school. He forgets how exactly it’d come up, only that Pete had shrugged it off. 

“Tony finagled the records so it looks like I was homeschooled and graduated already. Besides, if you could do this stuff full-time, wouldn’t you want to?” he says, gesturing at the city at large.

Peter would. Well, maybe.

May is pretty set on Peter having as normal a life as possible, superhero powers notwithstanding, and after the whole mess during his sophomore year Peter can understand why. He would definitely miss not getting to spend time with Ned every day, or even the weird sort-of friendship he has going with MJ now too.

He loves being Spider-Man, but sometimes he really needs to just feel... normal.

It’s weird to realize Pete is different from him in that way.

But maybe that makes sense too. It’s not like Mr. Stark would want to waste his time with a high school student. 

Peter shoves that thought as far away as he can. 

In any case though, he starts sleeping a little better, just knowing that some of his memories and fears don’t have to stay locked down inside his own head. He doesn’t tell Pete about the nightmares themselves; not exactly. Especially not some of the newer ones. But he talks around them in a way that still feels like a confession, like unloading.

Pete just snorts when he tries to explain it. Not in a mean way, but it throws Peter for a loop regardless.

“Sorry, sorry,” Pete says, noticing his expression. “I wasn’t - that wasn’t laughing at you. It’s just, y’know, Pete.”

“Huh?”

“Tony’s whole thing with acronyms. P-E-T-E? Stands for Pretty Emotionally Therapeutic Entity.”

Peter chokes on a laugh. “Seriously?”

“Seriously.”

“He couldn’t think of something for the R?”

“He likes to tell me the R stands for Reckless, and he left it out of the name because it wasn’t supposed to be in my directives, but you went and snuck it in there anyway when he wasn’t looking.”

“I’m not reckless!”

“Neither am I! But... I mean, you did sort of stowaway on an alien spaceship.”

“That was an accident.”

“Really?”

Pete’s got him there. True, Peter hadn’t really thought about it before he acted - he hadn’t had time. But in that moment there was no way in hell was he going to let himself drift safely back down to Earth and leave Mr. Stark to go take on a bunch of aliens on his own.

“Mr. Stark didn’t really create you to be like a therapist, did he?” Peter deflects.

“Dude, no. I think he just wanted someone to talk to, or someone to talk to him.” Pete is silent for a few beats, his gaze focused on the alleyway below. “He wanted you to tell him that it wasn’t his fault. Stuff like that.”

Peter swallows, hard. “It wasn’t,” he says.

“I know. And I told him that. But I think as much as he wanted to hear it, he couldn’t actually believe it.”

Pete glances up, meeting Peter’s eyes. Peter can only imagine what that must have been like, and Pete’s only ever alluded to it in the vaguest of ways before.

Pete shrugs. “Turned out okay though, I guess. Feeling responsible for losing you kept him motivated, feeling like he had to do whatever he could think of to bring you back for real.”

Pete says it like Peter is the only one that they brought back - like Dr. Banner’s snap hadn’t been about literally billions of other lives, but just about one: his. Or maybe Peter’s just hearing what he wants to hear, imagining that Mr. Stark had done the impossible, risked everything just to get Peter back.

Which is ridiculous. 

Mr. Stark may have figured out the how, but the Avengers had done it as a team, every single one of them with their own reasons. 

And besides, if Mr. Stark cared that much then he wouldn’t have started avoiding Peter practically as soon as the battle had ended and almost before the dust had cleared.

*

Four days later Peter is zoning out in the lab while he waits for a simulation to finish running when Mr. Stark walks in the door.

He hesitates for just the briefest second in the doorway, looking surprised to find Peter here. 

It’s Wednesday. He shouldn’t be surprised, not unless he somehow forgot what day it was.

“Hey, kid,” Mr. Stark says, belatedly. “What’re you working on?”

“CO2 conversion tech. I was trying to scale it down, make it possible for smaller cities to invest in their own production plants.”

“Good.”

And that’s apparently all he’s going to get. Mr. Stark is still a good six feet away, like he’s afraid if he comes any closer Peter is going lunge forward and bite him or something. It makes Peter want to scream.

The simulation finishes running.

Peter scans over the results. It’s efficient, but not quite efficient enough to be worth the investment for most places, he thinks. He can do better. 

“Did you uh, want to look at what I was doing?” he says, sliding his chair to one side so the screen is visible. Or it would be if Mr. Stark wasn’t still standing halfway across the room.

“Of course. I’ve gotta leave in a couple minutes, but I can take a quick look, make sure you’re on the right track.”

Peter resists the urge to roll his eyes. He’s worked with Mr. Stark for over two years now, and he’s not an idiot. Of course he’s on the right track. He just wants to know if Mr. Stark can think of any shortcuts to make the track go by a little bit faster, is all.

Mr. Stark steps over to the display, eyes scanning over the data, one hand coming up to rest against Peter’s upper back. It’s the kind of touch he wouldn’t have thought twice about a year ago - or three years ago, whatever. Mr. Stark was just kind of like that - he was always stepping into Peter’s space, squeezing his shoulder, putting his hand on Peter’s back to guide him one direction or another as they walked.

It doesn’t happen as much now. 

Peter stays very, very still, even as every instinct in his body clamors for him to lean back into the touch.

“Looks pretty good.” Mr. Stark’s hand slides up to the join of Peter’s neck and shoulder, squeezes once, then falls away.

“That’s it?” Peter blurts out, unable to stop himself.

“That’s - what? I said you’re making good progress, kid. Keep at it.”

Mr. Stark pulls his phone out of his pocket and glances down at it like he’s checking something. Peter hadn’t heard it vibrate.

“Gotta go,” Mr. Stark says. “Do me a favor and don’t blow anything up while I’m gone, okay?”

Mr. Stark doesn’t even look up from his phone as he says it. Peter resists the urge to throw something at the man, or grab the phone out of his hands and just squeeze until it falls to the floor in little pieces. 

He does neither.

“No promises, Mr. Stark.”

Pete is wrong, Peter thinks as he watches Mr. Stark walk out of the lab. 

Mr. Stark doesn’t miss Peter at all. Or at least, not in the way that Peter misses him.

*

For all that he and Pete don’t talk much about Mr. Stark or what’s its like to live at the tower, they talk about Peter’s life _a lot_. 

Peter figures it makes sense, he can’t imagine what he would feel like if he woke up one day and was told he was a clone and that someone else was out there living his life for him.

Peter doesn’t really mind talking about it, which is good because Pete seems to have a seemingly endless supply of questions. About Ned, about school, about May. He even asks about Flash sometimes, and who the heck wants to talk about Flash?

But Pete keeps asking questions, and Peter answers them as best he can.

No, he doesn’t remember the first time he met May. Or Ben, for that matter - he was probably a baby. May would know, if he asked her.

Yes, he and Ned became best friends practically on sight. They’d bonded over Legos and reruns of Invader Zim, and the rest was history.

No, he doesn’t really remember much about his parents.

For some reason, it’s thinking about the fleeting memories he has of his parents that does it, and Peter feels like an idiot for not noticing before now. There’s a reason Pete keeps asking about May, and Ned, and Ben.

“Oh god, you must miss them so much right? I’m so sorry, I didn’t even think about - ”

But Pete waves him off. “It’s okay, really.”

“But - ”

“Peter, seriously. It’s okay. It’s not… it’s not the same for me, as it would be for you.”

Peter frowns. He doesn’t get it. There’s no version of him that wouldn’t miss his family like crazy, clone or no. Yeah, maybe Pete had Mr. Stark, but that couldn’t be the same. Could it?

“Tony gave me a lot of your memories, but - he couldn’t give me everything. There’s a lot of stuff about your life that wasn’t saved on video, you know? I know who they are, I know that I - you - text them both a lot, but other than that it’s just kind of… blank.”

“You don’t really know them,” Peter says, slowly.

Pete nods in confirmation. “Can’t really miss someone you never knew, you know?”

“I guess not.”

Peter can’t quite wrap his head around it, the idea that Pete could be so much like him without even knowing the people in his life most responsible for making him who he was. It seems wrong.

“Would you want to know them? I mean, if there was some way to do it?”

“I dunno,” Pete says. “I haven’t really thought about it in a long time, I guess. At first, all that stuff was just gone, and even if there was some way for me to remember it, the people I’d be remembering were gone too. I’d just be remembering them to mourn them.”

“Yeah.” Peter nods; he gets it. “Things could be different now though, right?”

“Maybe. I don’t really know how we’d do it though, other than what we’ve been doing. Just talking about them.”

“How did Mr. Stark do it? Do you have a, um...” Peter trails off, not sure how to ask.

Pete stares at him, then bursts out laughing. “Oh my god, dude, _no_. I don’t have like a microUSB port in the back of my skull.”

“Sorry! I just, I wasn’t sure!”

Pete, still shaking with laughter, reaches out to grab Peter’s hand and bring it around to the back of his head. 

“See?” he says. “No on/off switch either.”

Peter has to laugh too, pulling Pete forward so he can perform his pseudo-examination. It’s weird, seeing and feeling his own neck like this - possibly even weirder than seeing his own face when he looks at Pete. At least he’s used to looking at his own face in the mirror every day, but it’s not like he looks at the back of his neck very often.

Pete’s forehead is pressed up against the join of Peter’s neck and shoulder, in almost the same spot Mr. Stark had touched him earlier in the week. Peter swallows, remembering.

He should probably let go; back off a bit before it gets weird - but Pete isn’t moving away either, and so they end up just sort of staying like that, leaning into one another.

It feels nice. Different from hugging Aunt May or Ned, and still a little weird. One of Pete’s hands comes up from his lap to twist into the hem of Peter’s shirt, the back of his knuckles brushing against Peter’s hip.

Pete turns his head to the side to talk. “So, don’t take this the wrong way, but I’m really really glad you’re okay with all this stuff.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just. I didn’t know if you were going to be mad at me, or too weirded out to ever want to see me, once you knew.”

Anger had never been in the equation. Shock, absolutely. More than a bit of confusion, too. That and a touch of envy. But it’d never crossed Peter’s mind to be angry about it.

“Would you be mad, if you were me?” Peter asks.

“No. But, I don’t really know what it’s like, you know? To be the real one. I’ve always known I was a copy.”

“You’re not a copy.”

“Uh, pretty sure you’re wrong there. Did you miss the part where I said Mr. Stark literally fed your DNA and biometrics into the regen cradle to make me?”

Peter shakes his head. “That’s not what I mean. You wouldn’t pick one twin and call them a copy, would you? Or two brothers, just because they looked really similar?”

“That’s different.”

“Not to me it isn’t. And if you think about it differently, that’s cool, but it kinda just proves my point, doesn’t it?”

Pete doesn’t answer him. They move onto other things - patrols and stuff going on in the lab, a dumb thing Flash had done that week, arguing over where to get the best pizza. Normal stuff.

Easy stuff.

They don’t talk about Pete’s memories or lack thereof again. But that’s okay.

*

Something changes after that conversation, something Peter would be hard put to explain in any kind of specific way. They touch more easily now - not just sitting side by side, but leaning against each other, one arm wrapped around the other one’s shoulders. 

Peter will laugh at Pete’s mask-hair and reach out to fix it for him, the times that he comes to meet up wearing the suit. Pete will take one look at Peter’s expression or the slump of his shoulders after a rough week of nightmares and pull him into a hug. 

When midterms week rolls around and just so happens to coincide with a run of Chitauri-tech assisted robberies in Queens, Peter almost considers skipping the Saturday meetup to catch up on some much-needed sleep. 

He goes anyway though, since it’s not like he has an easy way to tell Pete he won’t be coming.

“Dude, lay down before you fall down,” Pete tells him as soon as he gets there.

“Can’t,” Peter replies, unable to keep the bitterness out of his voice. “Got English Lit reading to catch up on.”

“So lay down and I’ll read it to you. Gimme.”

Pete grabs the book from his hands and pulls him over to lay down with his head resting on Pete’s thigh.

He falls asleep maybe ten pages in and can only hope he might have absorbed some of the rest of it through a kind of sleep-osmosis, because he wakes up three hours later to see Pete slumped back against the low ledge of the rooftop, out cold.

Peter spends a while just watching him sleep. It’s probably kind of creepy, but, well, Peter’s never seen himself asleep before. It’s weird. 

He wonders if Mr. Stark ever looks at Pete the same way he’s doing right now. 

“I can feel you watching me, you know,” Pete says, without opening his eyes.

Peter winces. “Sorry.”

“I swear, you and Tony are way more similar than either of you give yourselves credit for.” Pete opens his eyes, apparently just so he can roll them.

Peter files that comment away for later. 

He thinks about it a lot in the weeks that follow; at night, when he’s by himself in bed.

*


	3. Chapter 3

“I had this idea,” Pete says the next time they meet up, before Peter has even had a chance to sit down.

“Wow, all by yourself?”

Pete smacks at Peter’s shin. “This is important. I was thinking about what you said last time, about your memories.”

“Oh.” Peter hasn’t really thought about it much since then, but it’s clearly been on Pete’s mind.

“Yeah, and trying to figure out how Tony got the memories he had loaded into my head in the first place. ‘Cause it’s not like he was just saving files, otherwise there’d be no difference to me between your memories and like, the plot of Back to the Future. Right?”

Peter’s not entirely sure he follows, but he nods anyway. He guesses it makes sense, in a general sort of way - except that Peter’s own memories of watching Back to the Future were still personal memories. It wasn't just the movie he remembered when he thought about it; it was being curled up on the couch between May and Ben, the two of them tossing pieces of popcorn at each other over his head.

Pete knew the plot of the movie, but he didn't have any of the other stuff.

“Okay, so - what does that mean?” Peter asks.

“BARF.”

It takes a moment for Peter to make the connection. “The therapy thing?” 

“Exactly! What if we could like, put me inside your memories?”

Peter has to stop to think about it. He’s watched the video of Mr. Stark’s presentation of the tech at MIT, but he’s never actually seen it in person. As far as Peter knows, Mr. Stark had relegated the project to the scrap pile of ‘cool, but not useful and potentially dangerous in the wrong hands.’ The same place a lot of other ideas went to die. 

It’s not like he’s ever let Peter mess around with it.

He knows the tech isn’t meant to be used the way Pete is suggesting, though. It's a closed loop - you put the glasses on and it stimulates your memory centers, lets you relive an event from start to finish. The projection piece of it was super cool, but just watching those alone probably wouldn’t allow Pete to internalize a memory any more than watching any other video or holographic display would. 

They’d have to find a way to hook him into the feedback loop, so he wasn’t just watching the memory play out, but experiencing it for himself.

“We don’t have to, if it’s too weird. It was just an idea,” Pete says, quietly.

Peter blinks, turning his head to look over at Pete, whose expression has switched from barely contained excitement just a few moments ago to something more like resigned acceptance. Peter belatedly realizes that his dead silence is giving Pete the wrong impression.

“Shit, sorry. I wasn’t objecting or anything, I was trying to think about how it would work. Do you even have access to it?”

Pete is looking at him uncertainly. “You’re sure you’re okay with this?”

“I am if you are. I mean, it’s your head we’re gonna be messing around with.”

“It’s your head too, dude,” Pete says. “Your memories.”

“Oh. Well yeah, I guess so. But all I'd have to do is remember stuff, and that part's easy.”

They talk about it for a while - how it might work, how Pete thinks he can get away with borrowing it without Mr. Stark noticing.

"I can probably just ask him to explain it, if I get him in the right mood," Pete says. 

Peter makes a sound that sounds vaguely like agreement, and tries not to think about what might be involved in getting Mr. Stark 'in the right mood.' 

*

Most of Sunday is spent hanging out with Ned, both of them making only incremental progress on their history papers while mostly arguing about whether or not Kylo Ren was lying about Rey's parents. 

Peter keeps zoning out, wondering what Pete would think of the discussion, if he were here.

It's bad enough that Ned stops mid-sentence to ask, "Dude are you okay? You've been kind of weird lately."

"Yeah, sorry - I'm fine. Just really wish I was already done with this paper."

It's too much like when he'd first gotten bit; the near-constant itch under his skin, wanting to tell Ned everything. For all that Ned talked sometimes about not being able to keep a secret, he's been pretty awesome about it so far. 

Besides, they've already cleared the 'dude, I'm a superhero' hurdle with relative ease. Surely 'dude I have a secret clone' one had to be be easier. 

'Dude, my secret clone is boning my mentor and first celebrity crush, who both happen to be the same person,' would be a lot more awkward to work through, but there's no reason Peter has to go there with it. That part isn't really Peter's secret to tell, anyway.

Peter is pretty sure Ned still knows something is off. They've known each other for too long for it not to be obvious. Plus, by now Ned knows exactly how Peter acts when he's keeping a secret.

"Has Mr. Stark shown up for any of your lab sessions lately?" Ned asks.

"Nah. He's been really busy."

"Oh. Yeah I bet he must be, with the whole planetary defense thing. I wonder how that's going to work anyway. Like, are they going to make you sign up for it? Do you have to sign up, or are you like automatically included because you’re an Avenger?"

"I don't know."

“I still can’t believe you’re an _Avenger_. Like, for real now. Was there a ceremony? Did you have to swear an oath?”

“No, Ned. I told you, it was just a quick thing. I think that’s how it happens for most of us, actually.”

"Okay. But seriously, no one's said anything about the defense coalition? I thought Mr. Stark would've mentioned it to you, at least a little. Sort of like how he talked to you back when the Accords were still a thing."

"Nope, he hasn't said anything at all to me about it." Peter struggles to keep the irritation out of his voice. It's not Ned's fault. He's only asking the same questions Peter has been wondering about himself. 

But getting answers to those questions would require Mr. Stark to actually talk to him for more than five minutes at a time.

"C'mon,” Peter says, “let's just finish our papers so we can finally do something else."

Thankfully, Ned lets the subject drop.

Getting through the rest of the paper is still a slog, and Peter is still distracted, but eventually they finish and Ned can finally show off his latest video game haul.

When Peter gets home that night, he climbs into bed frustrated and exhausted. 

*

Mr. Stark is away on business the following Wednesday, but Peter’s actually totally fine with that, this time. 

He looks at the thick-framed sunglasses Pete plunks down on the table in front of him.

“Wait, that’s it?”

“What were you expecting?”

“I dunno. I knew the glasses were part of it from that presentation he did. I guess I thought there was another part of it, like a server or something hidden backstage.”

“Nope,” Pete says. “I mean, there’s the hologram tech piece, but that’s not what we need.”

Peter picks up the glasses, turning them over in his hands. They feel heavy - way more than titanium or polycarbonate frames would. He can only guess what they’re made out of.

“So, dry run first?” Peter says.

“Yeah. Just to get a baseline idea of how they work. Tony said all you have to do is put them on and think about the memory you want to revisit. ”

Peter pauses for a moment, searching back for a memory Pete would want to see. Nothing too heavy though, since he wasn’t sure how many tests they were going to have run before they could figure out a way to jerry-rig a secondary headset. 

Something in long term memory, since that’s where the vast majority of the memories they’d need to mine would be coming from, and Peter doesn’t know if tech works differently on short term stuff, but he suspects it might. Decision made, he slips the glasses onto his face and focuses his mind on meeting Ned for the first time. And then - 

“Oh woah,” he breathes out.

“Is it working?”

“Yeah it’s - it’s really weird.” Peter closes his eyes to tamp down on the sensory overload, but that only makes the memory come back even stronger; the sleek walls of the lab around him replaced with a colorful mishmash of art projects and science fair trophies of his third grade classroom. He can actually _smell_ it.

“Oh man, this is _so cool_.”

He can feel Pete lean in closer, their knees pressed together, Pete’s face probably only inches away from his own. But he can also feel the nervous excitement pounding through his own veins as he walks over to one of the empty desks and takes a seat. 

They’re supposed to learn about _space_ today; it’s gonna be awesome.

There’s a kid he doesn’t recognize sitting across from him. “Hi, I'm Peter,” he says, because Uncle Ben always says it’s important to be polite. He doesn’t immediately understand why the thought sends a pang of hurt running through him.

“I'm Ned,” the kid says back. “I like your backpack.”

“Yeah?” Peter looks down at the floor, where his brand new Star Wars backpack is slumped next to his chair. “Thanks! My aunt got it for me.”

“Awesome.”

Peter reaches up to his face, pulling off a pair of glasses that feel like they shouldn’t be there at all. The classroom fades, the smell of whiteboard markers and Elmers glue still lingering in his nose.

“Holy crap.”

“I’m assuming that means it works,” Pete says, watching him intently.

“Yeah dude, it works. It works crazy well. I felt like I was _there_.”

Pete takes a deep breath and blows it out. “Good.”

They get to work.

What they need is some kind of secondary system, like a shadow terminal that Pete can use to hitch a ride through Peter’s memories. It’s a simple enough concept in theory, but the actual development proves to be a lot more difficult. Doubly so because they can’t ask for FRIDAY’s help with it, not without risking tipping Mr. Stark off. 

What they do have though, is the design of the primary headset to work off of.

“It reads the parts of the brain that are stimulated in real time and uses that as a map to simulate sensory input. There’s also sort of like a predictive element to it - what were you thinking about, just now?”

“Third grade, meeting Ned for the first time.”

“Okay, so you probably don’t remember every single thing that was in the classroom, right? But the program has some idea what a third grade classroom looks like, and so do you, so it fills in the blanks for you to give you as complete an environment as it can.”

Peter nods along to the explanation. The same predictive tech was also probably being used to alter how other people reacted within the memory, if he was to change something. That was the point of the tech, after all; for Mr. Stark to go back and tell his parents he loved them one last time, before they were gone forever. 

Except Peter and Pete won’t be using the tech to alter memories; all they need to do is clone the sensory feedback loop from Peter’s end so Pete can live through the same experiences he had.

Pete ends up trying out the glasses as well, although he doesn’t say which memory he relives. It’s only a couple minutes, and he seems a little shaken when he pulls them off.

“You okay?” Peter asks, leaning in to look Pete in the eye, one hand braced on the other boy’s shoulder.

Pete nods. “Yeah, yeah I’m fine. I, um. I wasn’t totally sure they’d work on me.”

Shit, Peter hadn’t even considered that. It’s easy to forget, sometimes, that Pete’s brain isn’t built quite the same way as his own. But apparently close enough for the tech to still work, which is the important part.

They start small. Pete unlinks Mr. Stark’s printing tech from the network so they can create a secondary set of glasses to mess around with without FRIDAY knowing. Working together, they’re able to create a device-to-device subnetwork, which is relatively easy. Digging into the coding to slave the secondary headset to the primary turns out to be a lot harder. 

Somewhat unsurprisingly, Pete seems to be incredibly adept at digging through Mr. Stark’s code. And after two years of working with Mr. Stark in the lab, Peter’s no slouch at it either.

“Okay so this is what triggers the feedback loop,” he says, tapping a line of code on the holo-display. “If we can get this function to take the inputs from the other set and run the exact same way - ”

“- then we shouldn’t have to re-write everything to make it work.”

It takes a bit of experimenting - Peter puts on the primary set and thinks of memory after memory, both of them watching the output terminal as reams of data scroll by.

“So cool,” Peter says under his breath. Those lines and lines of data are his memories turned digital. And not just a video or a photo either, but the actual electrical impulses in his brain that mimicked the sense-memories. Like smelling whiteboard markers and Elmers glue in the classroom.

“Yeah,” Pete agrees.

When they finally get the secondary output terminal to stop throwing up errors, they try for the first test run. Pete puts on the secondary glasses, and Peter thinks of another memory - a simple one, just he and Ben and May at the beach one summer, playing in the waves.

He knows it must be working when he hears Pete gasp.

“I feel… sand?”

Peter can’t help the grin that breaks across his face. “Yeah. What else?”

“Smells like salt water. And I can hear a woman laughing.”

“Can you see her?” Peter holds his breath as he waits for the answer.

“It’s May! Her hair is short.”

Peter exhales in relief. 

Ben is there too, one hand on Peter’s shoulder to steady him as the waves break across their calves. May has her jeans rolled up to her knees, sandals held loosely in one hand, her hair whipping around in the wind. Peter looks up at Ben, who’s squinting off into the distance, trying to identify a small flock of birds. They’re definitely not seagulls, although there are plenty of those around too, squawking up a storm and generally circling the barbecue grills a little ways off.

Ben’s got the faintest touches of gray in his hair, Peter notices with surprise.

Peter feels a hand slide into his own, too smooth and too lean to be Ben’s. It’s Pete’s, he realizes after a moment. 

Peter doesn’t remember the entire day, but he relives it in flashes - chasing down one of May’s sandals through the waves when she’d accidentally dropped it in the water, Ben and May burying him in the sand all the way up to his neck. How good it’d felt to climb out (with some help) a few minutes later, running down to the water to rinse away the sand sticking to him everywhere - stuck in the waistband of his bathing suit, behind his ears, in his hair.

Peter licks his lips, tasting the salt water in the air, on his skin.

When the memory finally ends, Peter can’t bring himself to open his eyes right away.

But he has to know if it worked. If it _really_ worked.

He pulls off the glasses and looks over at Pete. He looks devastated.

“ _Shit_ , sorry. I should’ve picked something else. I’m sorry. I meant to stick with meeting Ned for the first one anyway, I don’t know why I - ”

“It’s okay!” Pete interrupts. “It’s fine. It was just - we were all so happy. You were, I mean.”

“ _We_ were.”

Their hands are still laced together. Peter gives Pete’s hand a squeeze and gets one back in response.

“Did you want to keep going? We don’t have to, if it’s too much,” Peter says.

“Yeah, yeah let’s keep going. If you’re okay with it?”

Peter shrugs. “I’m fine if you are.”

“I’m fine. Let’s keep going, just - maybe something not so intense?”

Peter knows what he means. The memory itself hadn’t been intense, but seeing Ben again, knowing that in a few short years he’d be gone - that part hadn’t been easy. Peter spins so they’re facing each other, legs criss-crossed, sitting knee-to-knee with one another.

“Wanna meet Ned?”

Pete grins. “ _Yeah_.”

They both put their glasses back on and spend the rest of the afternoon being eight years old again.

*

“I’m really glad we’re friends,” Peter tells Ned when he sees him at school the next day.

“I’m glad we’re friends too, dude,” Ned says, nodding at Peter and looking vaguely touched. “That’s not usually something you say to me out of the blue like that, but I really appreciate it. Wait - we’re not about to be attacked by aliens again or something, are we?”

“Not that I’m aware of.”

“That’s not super reassuring, you know that right?”

Peter shrugs.

*

Mr. Stark is back in town that weekend, so they can’t meet up in the lab. Neither one of them is particularly fond of the idea of reliving the memories out in the open, even if they are up on a rooftop away from prying eyes - but thankfully May has to work Saturday morning, so Peter gets up early to see her off and then waits for Pete to come by.

Pete steps into the apartment with some hesitation, looking around like he’s trying to absorb it all at once. He frowns.

“It’s smaller than your old place.”

“You knew the old apartment?” Oh, duh. Peter had worn the suit in the apartment a few times, those memories had probably been uploaded along with the all the rest. “Nevermind. Yeah, it is a bit. I guess Mr. Stark tried to get May to take a bigger one, but we thought since I’ll be going to college in a couple years we might as well save a bit on the rent, you know?”

“The stuff is different too.” 

“Yeah. Some of our stuff got saved - photos and mementos, stuff like that. But a lot of it we had to replace, when we got back.”

Pete looks over at him. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault. It happened to a lot of people when they came back. It’s a lot of what May’s doing now, trying to help people rebuild their lives.”

“No, but... I was around. I could’ve saved stuff, or asked Tony to buy out the apartment, but I didn’t even think - ”

“You thought we were gone for good, and so did Mr. Stark. Everyone did.”

Pete is still frowning.

“C’mon, let’s go to my room,” Peter says, grabbing a bag of chips from the basket on top of the fridge. “Hey, did you think of what you wanted to see today?”

“Um, yeah.”

They climb onto Peter’s bed, shoving pillows behind them so they can lean back against the wall, Peter ripping open the bag of chips and setting it between them. Pete pulls the glasses out of his bag and hands Peter his pair.

“So?” Peter asks.

“I thought it might be good to like, work through it in order, if we can?”

Peter nods. It makes sense. Memories were interlinked, each one colored by what came before and what followed after. Besides, cherry-picking just the easy ones was bound to leave Pete feeling like he was still missing things. Important things.

Peter turns his thoughts inwards, and tries to think back to the earliest thing he can remember.

He remembers being sick once, when he was really little. Everything had ached, and he couldn’t understand why it was so hot and so cold at the same time. He remembers his mom’s hand on his forehead, the frown in her voice when she’d checked his temperature. He remembers his dad reading to him, for what had felt like hours and hours until his fever had broken. He remembers the strawberry popsicles they’d let him eat, once it finally had. 

He remembers bubble baths, and sitting in his dad’s lap learning how to tie his shoes. And his mom blowing raspberries on his stomach every night when she tucked him into bed. 

Peter puts the glasses on and lets himself remember it all.

*

He has to blink at the clock a few times before the numbers make sense - it’s only been a couple hours, but it‘d felt like ages.

Their hands are linked together once again. Something about it was grounding; helped Peter remember he wasn’t walking through the memories alone. Pete seemed to need the connection just as much - for Peter all of this was well-trodden ground, but Pete was experiencing everything for the first time.

“You okay?” Peter asks.

Pete opens his mouth to reply, but closes it and shakes his head. Peter slips his hand out Pete’s grip and wraps his arm around Pete’s shoulders instead, pulling him close.

“I never really missed them before, you know?” Pete says, his voice raspy and quiet.

Peter doesn’t know, not exactly. He has no idea what it's like to be seventeen and not miss his parents every day. But he does know what it’s like to go from knowing his parents one minute to knowing that they’re gone in the next, and won’t ever be coming back.

“I know this isn’t really going to help, but you do get used to it, eventually. Or maybe not used to it, ‘cause you still miss them, but you figure out how to keep going anyway. May and Ben helped a lot, too. If - uh, if you want to keep going.”

Pete nods against his shoulder.

Peter puts his glasses back on. 

Starting again isn’t any easier; he remembers bits and pieces of the funeral, and then a lot of time spent curled up in Ben’s lap. There’d been a lot of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, because neither Ben nor May really cooked, and neither one of them had a clue how to make food for a five year old who had to be coaxed into eating anything at all.

They figure it out though, just like everything else. Peter eventually stops sleeping in their bed every night and starts sleeping in the den they hastily convert into a second bedroom.

They take him to the park, and to the beach, and to the Natural History Museum to look at dinosaur fossils and watch movies about the ocean on a giant movie screen. They take him to visit his parents’ graves, to leave buttons and stickers from the museums instead of flowers, and tell them all about the things he’s seen and learned and done.

It still hurts, but Peter learns to carry the hurt with him rather than letting it drag him under.

He remembers movie nights with Ben. _You’re gonna love this one, kiddo_ , Ben would say every time, before launching into an explanation why. He remembers watching Back to the Future, and the Lord of the Rings, and that Star Trek movie where they’d saved the whales.

May shoots Ben a _look_ when he brings home Alien for the first time.

“You’re really going to show him that?”

“Why not? He’ll love it!”

“I think there’s a rule,” May says, eyes narrowing, “you have to be able to spell Xenomorph before you can watch Alien.”

“I can spell Xenomorph!” Peter chimes in, eager to prove himself.

“Can you?” May asks.

“Um. Can you use it in a sentence?”

“How about this: Uncle Ben is going to spend the next month checking under your bed and in your closet every night for Xenomorphs.”

Just behind May, Ben is making a lot of complicated hand gestures in Peter’s direction.

Peter gets the “x”, but flubs it in the home stretch by going for an ‘f’ instead of ‘ph’. They watch the movie anyway, and just as May predicted, Ben spends the next several weeks checking the apartment over and over again for lurking Xenomorphs at Peter’s terrified insistence.

Two months later Ben brings home _Aliens_ , and this time Peter spells Xenomorphs perfectly on the first try without any outside help. The second movie is just as scary as the first, but Peter likes it.

They end up back at the beach, the very same memory they’d started out with the first time.

Peter opens his eyes slowly, figuring that’s as good a place as any to take a break.

“All the movies,” Pete starts to say, trailing off.

“Yeah, those were all Ben.”

"Tony didn't know that."

Peter stiffens. "Well, now you can tell him. If you want."

"Nah," Pete says, yawning. "I'd have to explain how I know, since I didn't before, and I can't."

Pete has to leave not long after, since May is due back in the afternoon. He feels sort of oddly numb, alone in the apartment again, old memories painfully fresh in his mind. He doesn’t really do much until she gets home.

“What’re you up to, kiddo?” May asks, tousling his hair as she walks by the couch.

“Nothing. Hey, you want to watch a movie?”

“Yeah. You pick something, I’m gonna get changed.”

Peter scrolls through Netflix until he finds a classic - something they’ve both seen a million times but will both enjoy nonetheless. They lean into each other on the couch, May’s hand in his hair. She seems to know what he’s thinking without a word. 

“I miss him too,” she says, quietly.

*

Peter’s early memories are a lot of short flashes, but as he gets older the memories are more complete, longer, and there are just more of them in general.

It’s not entirely sequential; it’s not like Peter can flip through his memories like pages in a book. But he tries not to skip around as much as possible. 

The next time they meet up, Mr. Stark is back in town, and May isn’t working, so they’re stuck on a rooftop again. Peter climbs up the side of a building and sets his backpack between his legs, pulling out a photo album to help things along.

There’s some stuff in there he hasn’t thought about in years - had completely skipped over, last time.

Pete cocks an eyebrow when he arrives, glancing down at the album. “Retro.”

“Yeah. May - ”

“- hates digital photos. I know,” Pete finishes for him, grinning. Pete unpacks his own bag, laying out a bounty of snacks between them. “Ready?”

“Ready.”

Peter glances down at the album and then slides the glasses on, remembering his sixth birthday; the first one since his parents had died.

Peter cranes his head back to watch the lemurs jumping from branch to branch, their tails cantilevered out to help them balance. His hands are sticky from tearing off pieces of funnel cake, fingers splayed out wide over the handrail of the exhibit.

“Want a lift?” Ben asks.

Peter nods without turning his head away, captivated. Ben chuckles and lifts him up onto his shoulders for a better look. He’s too big now to spend much time up there - he’s not as small as he once was, but it’s more than enough time to look his fill.

The rest of the day passes in a blur. They eat pizza for dinner. It’s a great day - at least until the birthday cake comes out and Peter remembers in a flash that it’s not just a regular fun day, it’s his _birthday_.

It’s his birthday, and he’s not with May and Ben because his parents are busy working, he’s with them because his mom and dad are gone and they aren’t coming back.

Instead of blowing out the candles, Peter bursts into tears.

The lights are turned on, the candles hastily extinguished and the cake vanishes somewhere out of sight - not that Peter is all that aware of any of it, sobbing into May’s chest and trying to apologize.

“Shh, honey. It’s okay,” May whispers in his ear, one hand cupped around the back of his head and her other hand rubbing up and down his back. “It’s okay.”

“S-s-sorry.”

May pulls away, tipping his chin up to look at her. “Hey, remember what I told you? We don’t apologize for crying, not in this family.” 

It only makes Peter sob all the harder, but he does stop trying to apologize.

*

Other memories are easier.

Like getting first place in the science fair in second grade, or the time he and Ned had snuck into Ned's dad’s workshop and tried to build a miniature catapult. 

He stands on a stepstool in the kitchen, tearing up lettuce while May chops vegetables for a salad. Eats popcorn on the couch while Ben tells him, _watch this part Pete, this is so great;_ Ben pointing just as something epic happens onscreen. He does his homework at the kitchen table, rushing through it because one of May’s coworkers gave her an old broken DVD player and she said he could take it apart if he finished everything before dinner.

Every time they slip out of the memories, it’s quiet.

Peter will grab a soda and take a long drink, waiting for Pete to say something. Sometimes he doesn’t say anything at all. Peter gets it, sort of. He can’t really understand what it’s like, trying to absorb a lifetime’s worth of memories in short bursts like this, week after week.

It’s not always just about the memories, though. They talk a lot too - and it’s somehow even easier now. There’s a shorthand there now that didn’t fully exist before, a catalogue of references they share with barely more than a word, or a look.

Peter still brings his homework, working on it while Pete flips through his photo albums - slotting each image into place in his memories, searching for any he doesn’t recognize. Peter doesn’t remember every picture; there’s a lot he has no memory of at all, but he’ll usually recognize the apartment, or the shirt he’s wearing, or something else completely trivial that will spark a new memory to relive.

Some memories are harder than others.

The memory of getting bitten leaves them both shaken. The memory of Ben’s death is even worse.

It hurts to look at Pete and see his own pain mirrored back at him; both of them mourning, both of them responsible.

May must notice the nightmares getting worse, but she doesn’t say anything about it, just pulls him into the living room to watch late-night reruns of old buddy cop movies that Peter forgets the names of. 

“Maybe you could hang up the suit for a little while, just to give yourself a break,” she suggests.

But Peter shakes his head. He doesn’t know how to explain it to her, that taking a break wouldn’t help with the nightmares anyway. The only thing that’s going to help is time, which he knew before but sees now with even more clarity. It’d been the same way after he’d lost his parents, and after Ben. The pain and the fear didn’t go away, but you learned how to carry it with you - and Peter would learn to carry this too, just like he had all the rest.

Besides, he doesn't have to carry it alone anymore.


	4. Chapter 4

One quiet Wednesday when Mr. Stark is out of town (again), Peter and Pete opt to skip ahead and relive all of Berlin together. 

They’re grinning like idiots, both of them remembering what it was like to put on the suit for the first time; the insanity of the fight at the airport, swinging around the city later that night to burn off the still-lingering adrenaline rush. But at some point the suit came off, slung haphazardly over the back of the chair in Peter’s hotel room, and Pete’s original memory of that night ends. 

Peter’s doesn’t though. He blushes bright red when he remembers what he did after that, because while the adrenaline rush may have run its course, he’d still been kind of amped up mentally, overstimulated and completely unable to get to sleep.

“Oh my god, we didn’t,” he hears Pete say beside him as he watches himself scrolling through the VOD options on the screen.

Peter winces. “Yeah, we did.”

“Does Tony know?”

“I don’t think he looked all that closely at the hotel bill with everything else going on, but, uh… I think Happy might have.”

Pete has one fist pressed up against his mouth. “Happy paid for our porn,” he says to himself slowly, horrified. 

“Technically I think he just signed off on the charges. Mr. Stark paid.”

Pete shoots him a look. 

Yeah, that doesn’t make it better. 

He wonders if he should pull them out of the memory, or jump forward to the next morning to save them both the embarrassment. It’s incredibly weird, watching himself stretched out on the hotel bed, feeling his hand cupping himself through the soft fabric of his sweats, knowing Pete is feeling the same thing.

Peter pulls his knees up, thighs pressed together - the movie is playing in the background now, the sounds of canned moaning almost but not quite covering his own hitched breathing as his memory-self starts to jack himself off. 

But while Peter is busy curling inward, Pete seems to be doing the exact opposite beside him; sprawled out to give himself room, one bent knee pressed against Peter’s outer thigh.

“Should we, um,” Peter tries.

“Hm?”

He swallows. “I can skip forward.”

“Don’t. I wanna see.”

It’s half request and half demand, and in the end it’s easy to let memory carry them both along as if neither one of them has any choice in the matter. 

Peter presses his knees together even tighter and curses himself for wearing jeans. Pete seems to be having much the same thought, because underneath the very much fake-sounding moans, Peter hears the distinctive sound of a zipper being undone. Peter freezes at the sound. 

He doesn’t look over - that would be doubly weird. Although he’s pretty sure it’s already plenty weird, watching yourself watch porn while your sort-of clone is (almost definitely) jerking off right next to you. Peter can actually feel the minute clench and release of Pete’s thigh against his leg. He risks a glance, just quickly enough to catch the way Pete’s hand is fisted up inside his boxers, some strange sympathetic impulse making his toes curl up in his sneakers and his dick twitch at the sight.

Screw it.

Peter unzips his jeans and shoves his hand down into his boxers as well.

He’s still wearing his webshooters in the memory, hasn’t taken them off since he’d put them on with the rest of the suit before heading to the airport, not even to shower when he’d come back.

It’s that thought that does it more than anything else; Mr. Stark’s tech sized to fit his wrists perfectly, tech he must have built himself, custom, just for Peter. The edges of the hard composite casing digging into Peter’s stomach as he jerks himself off in the middle of the insane hotel suite Mr. Stark got for him.

In the memory, he comes with a soft moan long before the movie is done playing. He reaches out for the remote blindly with his non-sticky hand, clicking the TV off - now that he’s not actively getting off on it, all the fake moaning is hard to listen to without feeling vaguely embarrassed in a second-hand (and now third-hand... possibly fourth-hand?) kind of way. 

Pete swears when the TV clicks off, head thunking back against the wall. “You didn’t watch the rest?”

Peter shakes his head.

“Damn.” 

Out of the corner of his eye, Peter can see Pete darting a look over in his direction, an uncertain expression on his face.

“Would you, uh... want to see any of my memories? Of, you know - ” Pete doesn’t finish the question, but he doesn’t need to. Neither one of them is in any position to hide what they’re doing. What neither of them have finished doing.

But what Pete is offering - they haven’t talked about it. Pete hasn’t really brought it up, and Peter hasn’t wanted confirmation that Pete and Mr. Stark sharing a bed means exactly what he thinks it means, regardless of how obvious the answer already is. Not talking about it hasn’t stopped Peter from thinking about it though, every night when he’s alone in bed; what it would be like to stretch out and feel the steady rise and fall of Mr. Stark’s chest under his palm, if he wanted. What it would be like to feel those hands touching him in return.

“We don’t have to,” Pete adds. “But - you’ve been really cool about sharing yours, so... if there’s anything of mine you wanted to see, just like, say the word and we’re there.”

It’s tempting. 

It’s so, so tempting. 

Tempting enough that Peter hears himself agreeing even before he’s had a chance to stop and think about whether or not he wants that kind of confirmation, that level of detail kicking around in his head. Fantasies about how it might go were one thing, but knowing for sure - that was different.

Knowing for sure that Mr. Stark wanted Pete in a way he definitely didn’t want Peter was worse. 

But the potential for getting hurt has never stopped Peter before, and it sure as hell isn’t going to stop him now. 

He wants to _know_. 

He wants to know what it feels like to be in Pete’s place, even if he won’t ever have it for himself.

“Yeah, yeah sure. I wanna see,” he says, echoing Pete’s own words from earlier.

Peter fumbles taking off his glasses and swapping with Pete, but Pete just grins dopily at him and winks. It calms him a little bit for some reason; the wink is all Mr. Stark, but Pete is clearly just as jazzed for this as he is.

Peter closes his eyes, and when he opens them he finds himself in bed. 

A nice bed, by the feel of it, with silky cool sheets. He’s somewhere in the murky boundary between asleep and awake, and it takes a moment to recognize what must have woken him is the mattress dipping gently somewhere behind him.

Even half-conscious as he feels in the moment, Peter knows it’s Mr. Stark.

A hand slides over his hip under the covers and yep, okay, apparently he’s naked under the sheets. Peter is aware that his heart is pounding in reality, but in the memory he’s perfectly calm. Lazy, almost. This isn’t the first time they’ve done this - not the second or the third or the fourth, either.

He feels lips brush against the back of his neck, that same hand squeezing at his bare hip.

“You awake?” Mr. Stark whispers, and Peter shivers at the feel of the words against his skin.

“Mm, am now.”

Mr. Stark’s arm snakes around to his stomach, pulling him back against the warmth of his body, planting an open-mouthed kiss to the skin at the join of Peter’s neck and shoulder.

“You should be asleep. It’s late.”

Peter snorts. “Do you even know what time it is?”

Mr. Stark doesn’t answer. His stubble is scratchy against Peter’s neck, sending shivers down his spine. His hand is splayed out over Peter’s stomach, stroking and massaging with no apparent goal in mind. Peter groans and shifts his hips, dick already half-hard and aching.

Outside of the memory, Peter is fully hard, one hand fisted around his cock, the knuckles of his other hand brushing against the outside of Pete’s thigh.

He’s thought about this before - maybe not exactly this; not the sharp tang of whiskey he can smell on Mr. Stark’s breath, but the feel of the man’s hands, the scratch of his beard. He’s imagined both of those so many times and so many different ways the exact circumstances seem trivial at best.

“What do you want?” Mr. Stark says, his voice pitched low. It’s not meant as a challenge. It’s an offer.

“You know.”

“I don’t, Pete. You gotta say it. I need you to tell me -”

“Touch me,” Peter pleads, and is instantly rewarded when the hand splayed out over his stomach slides down to wrap around the base of his cock. 

He can’t control the embarrassingly high-pitched whine that escapes his lips as Mr. Stark starts to jack him off, slow and steady. Mr. Stark is kissing along his jawline, muttering Peter’s name over and over again, seemingly unconscious of it.

Peter rocks his hips forward into Mr. Stark’s fist, impatient for more and Mr. Stark obliges, picking up the pace until Peter’s breath is stuttering and his eyes are squeezed so tightly shut he’s seeing vague flashes of light against his eyelids.

He comes with a gasp, wet heat spilling out of him against the silk sheets. 

Mr. Stark doesn’t stop touching him right away; he strokes Peter through the aftershocks, hand slipping down further to cup Peter’s balls, then trailing the pads of his fingertips up and down Peter’s thighs. 

Mr. Stark’s head is on the pillow just behind Peter’s own. Peter can feel his breathing growing steadier with each passing second.

Eventually Mr. Stark’s hand drifts away from his groin, his arm wrapping back around Peter’s stomach and pulling him in tight. Almost tight enough to hurt - but it only lasts for a few minutes before Mr. Stark’s body slackens, bit by bit, finally falling asleep.

Despite the rapidly-cooling wet spot, Peter feels himself drift off too.

He doesn’t open his eyes right away when the memory ends, hand still shoved in his jeans, sticky with come. He’d be embarrassed about it, but he’s almost certain Pete is in the exact same situation right beside him.

“Woah,” Peter says.

“Dude, how have we not thought about using this for sex stuff until now?”

“Yeah that was - um. Really good.”

“I mean, forget therapy. This tech could make a killing in the porn industry.”

“...I guess?”

“You don’t think so?”

“Sure, maybe. But how are you gonna explain to Mr. Stark how you know how it works?”

“Oh. Right.” 

Pete looks down at himself and makes a face, then shoots a web to yank a over a thing of paper towels, grabbing a couple for himself and then passing the roll over to Peter so he can clean himself up too.

“Hey uh, was that okay?” Pete asks, without looking up.

“What? Yeah, of course.” Peter has to make a conscious effort not to gesture down at the mess in his boxers as proof. _Was that okay_ , as if Pete hadn’t just given him his standing jerkoff fantasy come to life. “Is it - um, is it always like that?”

“Hm? Oh - no, not always. That was before they brought everyone back, and Tony was still kind of a mess. You know, drinking a lot and whatever. But I didn’t want to jump in with anything super intense, in case it was too much.”

“Oh.”

“You can ask me, you know. If you want. I’ve been trying not to talk about it because I didn’t know if you wanted to hear about that stuff.”

Peter presses his lips together. “The drinking?” he says, knowing full well that wasn’t what Pete meant.

“That too I guess, but I was talking about the sex.”

There it is, laid out in the barest possible terms, and it hurts just as much as Peter was expecting it to - maybe just a little bit more. He pushes it away for now. He’ll face it later, when he’s alone.

“Does he still drink a lot?” he asks instead.

Pete shakes his head. “He stopped when he realized there was a way to bring everyone back. Not cold turkey or anything like that, but it’s not like it was before.”

Peter doesn’t quite know what to say to that. 

“That’s good,” he tries, which sounds just as stupid out loud as it had in his head.

“Now he just works a lot instead,” Pete adds, the faint tinge of disappointment in his voice far too familiar for Peter not to catch it.

“It’s important work,” Peter says.

It’s the same thing he’s told himself over and over again, ever since he’d come back. Like at first when Mr. Stark used to show up just a little late to his lab sessions, obviously distracted. And even more often later, when he stopped coming altogether. _Mr. Stark is an important man, and he has important work to do, keeping the whole world safe. Making sure something like the Snap can’t happen again_.

Pete flashes him a look that says he knows exactly why Peter needs so badly to believe that.

“Yeah, it is,” he agrees.

*

Mr. Stark doesn’t usually wear his tinted sunglasses in the lab. Not that they’re super dark or anything, but even so, it’s weird. 

Peter figures hey, at least he’s here this week.

Not that it makes much of a difference from the weeks when he doesn’t make it. Mr. Stark mostly stays buried in his own project - something about restructuring a water filtration system, only stopping to make off-hand comments to Peter every so often without looking up. 

It would bother Peter a lot more if he wasn’t just as determined to hide, half-convinced that Mr. Stark will just know by looking at his face what he and Pete have been doing. 

In any case, for most of the afternoon neither one of them seems to be especially interested in probing conversation - or conversation of any kind, really. Peter because he’s actively avoiding it, and Mr. Stark because he looks like the only thing keeping him awake right now is his determination to get water system thing done as quickly as possible. 

They both stick to their own work, and Peter tries repeatedly to swallow the lump that’s taken up residence in his throat.

“You’ve been spending a lot of time in the suit,” Mr. Stark says at one point, a couple hours in.

“Yeah.”

“May okay with that?”

“Yeah. Yeah she’s fine. She knows I - ” Peter stumbles over his words, “...she knows why.”

It’s not necessarily a lie. Peter hasn’t exactly explained to her why he’s been spending so much time out on patrol - even aside from the time he’s been spending with Pete, but she knows him. She _could_ know. He wouldn’t put it past her to have already figured it out.

Peter risks a glance over at Mr. Stark, whose hands are spread flat on the lab table in front of him. The tinted glasses don’t hide the way he’s staring hard, down at the table between his hands.

“Should I know why?” Mr. Stark asks.

Peter shakes his head, even though he knows Mr. Stark won’t be able to see it. “No.”

“You - nevermind.” Mr. Stark stops, nudging his glasses up so he can pinch the bridge of his nose.

“What?”

“You know it’s okay to spend some time being a normal kid, right? The world isn’t hanging in the balance right now. Take a night off every once in a while.”

“Do you? Take a night off every once in a while?”

Peter hadn’t meant for that to slip out, but it finally gets Mr. Stark to look up from the table; he stares hard at Peter for a beat before glancing away again.

“No, but that’s me, not you. I thought the point of this whole mentorship thing was for you to learn from all my many and varied mistakes.”

The room isn’t completely silent in the minute or so that follows, there’s too much tech around them, busy whirring and humming.

“I feel better when I’m in the suit,” Peter says, quietly.

“Better?”

“Yeah. All the stuff that’s happened, I - it’s not like I can change any of it. But I can be out there, trying to make sure nothing else happens now. I can be ready.”

“Pete -” Mr. Stark starts, and stops just as abruptly. The color drains from his face.

Peter wouldn’t have noticed, if he hadn’t already known to listen for it. But there’s a reason Mr. Stark never calls him Pete anymore. Or, not this version of him, at least.

Like clockwork, Mr. Stark looks down at his watch. “Shit, I’ve got a thing I’m supposed to be at. You okay here if I duck out early?”

“Yeah, I’m fine,” Peter says. As if he was going to say anything else. He's always fine.

Mr. Stark is out the door a minute later, leaving Peter along in the lab. Peter spends a while longer pretending to work, but eventually gives up and heads out as well. He can’t focus on anything right now anyway. 

*

He goes out on patrol instead, turning off the heater and letting the rush of cold air through the suit and the burn in his shoulders as he swings between buildings clear his head. Not much is going on tonight, which, yeah it’s Wednesday. He wasn’t expecting much of anything.

Peter isn’t actually sure if he wants something to happen or not. It might help distract him, if there was something important to focus on, but on the other hand, if something important did come up he’s not sure if his head would be in it enough to not miss something, possibly get somebody hurt by mistake.

Probably better that it’s quiet.

It’s just… it’s hard to reconcile everything sometimes. Feeling scared of what might happen, but relieved knowing Mr. Stark will be there to back him up if something does. But only for the big stuff. Not for the every day, weekly lab time type stuff. Not when Peter is alone at night and can’t close his eyes without feeling like he’s drifting off into nothingness again, his eyes snapping open, heart pounding.

Or knowing what it feels like to have Mr. Stark’s lips brushing against his neck, his palm splayed out against Peter’s stomach, but the man can barely bring himself to look at Peter when they’re in the lab together. That it hurts in such a stupid, simple way that he won’t even call Peter ‘Pete’ anymore - feels like something’s been taken away, stolen by someone else.

Not that any of this is Pete’s fault, but still. It feels like it should be _somebody’s_ fault. And Peter can’t bring himself to really blame Mr. Stark for any of it, even if maybe he should.

He just wishes he didn’t feel so torn in five different directions all the time. Like he got pasted back into the world just a little off-center, so none of the edges fit right anymore.

*

It doesn’t stop him from asking Pete to share more of his own memories. As much as it hurts sometimes, Peter still wants to see - still wants to know for himself what it’s like.

Peter and Pete trade memories back and forth, like flipping through the channels on the TV. Peter is nine ( _nine and three quarters_ ) when Justin Hammer’s drone demo goes nuts at the Stark Expo and starts trying to shoot everyone. 

He’s old enough to know that the blaster on his palm is just a toy, but he’s frozen in place in anyway. His legs won’t move. Even if they could, no way he could outrun how fast all those drones can fly. He raises his hand, wishing he were as strong and as brave as Iron Man, that he could _do_ something, anything other than stand there, frozen in place - and then the drone in front of him explodes.

“He didn’t know that was you,” Pete says, slowly. “At least, I don’t think he did. He didn’t give me the memory, and he’s never said anything about it.”

Peter shakes his head. “I never mentioned it.”

Peter knows what it’s like to sit on a dock out in the woods somewhere, jeans rolled up and bare feet just skimming the cool lake water, leaning back on his hands and tipping his head back to grin up at Mr. Stark, who’s standing right behind him. They sit on the dock for what feels like hours, nothing except the wind in the trees and the clink of ice in Mr. Stark's glass to interrupt the silence.

A year after the Expo something rips a hole in the sky above Stark tower and a whole horde of aliens pour into Manhattan. 

Peter spends the afternoon curled up on the couch with May’s arm wrapped tight around his shoulders, both of them wishing Ben was right there with them instead of halfway across the city, stuck at work.

Peter doesn’t find out the whole story behind the nuke until later - much later, after DC. 

No one had really known back then that it hadn’t been planned that way; they’d all just assumed that Mr. Stark somehow knew that sending a nuclear warhead through the portal would stop the invading army in their tracks.

Peter is eleven, getting bullied by the older kids at recess; and twelve, watching shaky cellphone footage of some seriously weird stuff going on in London. He’s thirteen when he starts discovering what his dick is for, and can’t explain to May why he _really_ wants to keep the Iron Man poster up on the wall in his room, even after all that stuff that happened in Sokovia.

Pete watches that conversation with both hands clasped over his face, caught somewhere between cringing in horror and hysterical laughter. He’s more than a little bit indignant on Mr. Stark’s behalf, but mostly he’s amused.

And in return, Peter knows now exactly how it feels when Mr. Stark pushes a finger inside of him, or threads his hands through Peter’s hair to tug his head down for a kiss. He knows what it feels like to have beard-burn rapidly healing on his inner thighs, and the way that Mr. Stark will sometimes set his teeth against Peter’s shoulder, letting them scrape along the skin as he pushes inside.

Peter hasn’t come so many times or gone through so many tissues so fast in his life, jacking off to memories of someone else’s memories. Someone else's memories that could be his, but aren't.

It’s enough that he’s almost thankful Mr. Stark doesn’t show up to their next lab session, even though it hurts to be ignored yet again. Peter isn’t sure how he could look Mr. Stark in the face without doing something heinously embarrassing, not now that he knows exactly how it feels to have Mr. Stark’s tongue in his mouth. Not to mention a few other places.

So, Peter chats with FRIDAY and lets DUM-E help out when he can, and sends up a silent thank-you to the universe that he has another week to figure out how to keep his thoughts (and his dick) in check before he sees Mr. Stark again, with all these new memories rolling around in his head. Which is, of course, why Mr. Stark shows up at the apartment for dinner three days later.

“Uh,” Peter says, staring at him standing in the doorway.

“Are we eating out in the hallway, or…?” Mr. Stark says, gesturing at Peter, who belatedly moves out of the way. Mr. Stark steps inside and Peter closes the door behind him.

“You’re early,” May calls out from the kitchen.

“I thought I was on-time.”

“Yeah, but I wasn’t expecting you to be.”

Mr. Stark's brow wrinkles, like he's trying to figure out if he should feel insulted or not.

Peter looks back and forth between May in the kitchen and Mr. Stark in the front hallway.

“You knew - ?” he says.

They both ignore him.

“I can circle around the block a few times, if you want. Or… help,” Mr. Stark offers, stepping into the kitchen and looking around.

May pauses and they both regard each other. Peter is still waiting for an explanation of what the hell is going on right now.

“You can help Peter set the table,” May says, after a beat.

Peter nods, numbly grabbing plates and glasses out of the cabinets and handing them off to Mr. Stark, who seems to be equally mindful about not letting their hands brush.

“Um, what’s going on?” Peter asks.

“Hopefully dinner," Mr. Stark says. "May invited me, and I thought it would be a good idea to check in, make sure you two were settling into the new place okay.” He makes it sound like this is something totally normal that he’s done a hundred times before, as opposed to literally the first time he’s been here since they moved and only the second time he’s been to Peter and May’s apartment, ever.

There’s a big bowl of salad, and garlic bread wrapped up in tinfoil, still warm from the oven, and a pan of baked ziti large enough that even with company and Peter's supercharged appetite, he and May will probably be eating leftovers for a week.

“Smells delicious,” Mr. Stark says.

“Well, nothing caught fire this time, so I’m already counting the recipe as a win,” May says as she takes her seat.

The salad and bread get passed around the table, and the ziti served from the center in large, cheesy scoops. Peter focuses on his plate while May and Mr. Stark trade small talk so intentionally innocuous it almost sounds scripted. Mr. Stark asks about how the new apartment is working out and May’s charity work. May asks about rebuilding efforts around the city, carefully avoiding anything to do with reconstruction at the compound or the UN defense coalition.

It’s not until the end of the meal that the reason for this whole visit becomes obvious.

“How’s school going?” Mr. Stark asks Peter. “I heard Midtown wasn’t as badly hit with the overcrowding as some other places.”

“Uh, fine?” Peter says.

“Yeah? All your after school clubs back open again - band, decathlon, all that stuff?”

This is a trap. No way Mr. Stark asks that question without already knowing.

“Yep, they’re all started again.”

“You’re just not going to any of them,” Mr. Stark says, and it’s not a question.

“Wait,” Peter says. “That’s what this visit about? You’re here because I quit robotics lab again?”

Mr. Stark opens his mouth to respond but May gets there first.

“He’s here because I’m worried about you," she says. "I thought, after everything that happened, you just needed some time to process, let things get back to normal. I _thought_ that the point of this internship was so you would have someone you could talk to about the hero stuff.”

Peter looks back and forth between them, gobsmacked. “Oh come on, seriously?”

Mr. Stark isn’t looking at him. Instead, he’s watching Peter’s right hand, where he’s busy fiddling with the handle of his fork. Which - oops, now has a small dent in it.

Peter sets the fork back down on his plate.

What Peter would like to do is remind both of them that talking to Mr. Stark about ‘hero stuff’ would require Mr. Stark to look him in the eye every once in a while, and maybe not run out of the room every time they talk about anything even vaguely not-science related.

But based on the expression on Mr. Stark’s face, he isn’t here entirely of his own free will. Peter would be willing to bet May’s offer to come to dinner tonight had been something a lot more like a demand, and even though Mr. Stark still could’ve just said no, he didn’t because he still felt responsible for Peter ending up on Titan - and everything else that came after. Peter knows all that, or at least he’s pretty sure of it, based on all the stuff Pete has said or sort of implied over the past couple of months.

Which also means Peter can’t call Mr. Stark out on any of it - not when it might mean admitting he knows about Pete, especially not with May sitting right here.

“So, what, you’re gonna take away the suit again?” Peter asks, wishing his voice sounded steadier.

Mr. Stark closes his eyes for a brief second. Out of the corner of his eye, Peter catches May discreetly slipping out of her chair and heading out to the living room to give them some space.

“No, that’s not - I’m not taking away the suit. I don’t want you caught without it if you need it.” ( _Not again_ , he means, Peter thinks wryly.) “But you can’t keep going on like this, and I’m not just saying that, okay? I’ve been there. I’ve done the whole on-all-the-time hypervigilance thing. 

“I know it feels safer to stay in that headspace, because you feel like if anything comes at you then at least you’re already expecting it, you’ll be ready, but the problem is you can’t stay there forever. You get sloppy, and then you make mistakes that put the people you care about in danger. I know you’ve got superpowers, but you’re still human, and that means you’ll crash, eventually, and the longer you try to run out the clock the harder you’ll go down when you do.”

Peter already knows. Ever since coming back it’s felt like an agonizing slow-motion crash he hasn't been able to escape.

“Every time I try to fall asleep, it feels like I’m back on Titan again,” Peter says, achingly aware that even though she’s in the other room, May can probably still hear him. “You know, at the end.”

Mr. Stark isn't looking at him, but he nods in response. “Yeah. I thought it might be something like that. Which is why I brought you a little something that might help.”

He sets a very familiar looking glasses case down on the table in front of Peter.

“Wha - um, what?”

“Took a couple days to even find the suckers, haven’t even looked at them in years. I did a whole presentation at MIT a couple of years ago, not that you would’ve seen it -” 

Peter had. Of course he had.

“- anyway, it’s called Binarily Augmented Retro-Framing. Yes, that stands for BARF, and no, I haven't thought of a better name for them yet. They let you relive memories to sort of jump-start processing grief, trauma, that sort of thing. You don’t have to use them, but if you want them, they’re yours.”

Peter reaches out with shaky hands to flip open the case, revealing the all-too-familiar set of glasses inside. He briefly wonders if Pete had been caught with them, or if he’d been putting them back in whatever storage locker they’d come from between meetings. He wonders if Mr. Stark has noticed they’ve been tampered with. 

Probably not, if he’s handing them off to Peter like this.

“What do I do?” Peter asks, because he knows he should.

“Put them on and think of a memory. I’d recommend not doing it alone, at least not the first time.”

Peter is almost certain that piece of advice comes from direct experience.

“Should I - um, right now?”

Mr. Stark’s sharp intake of breath probably wouldn’t be audible to anyone else, but Peter doesn’t have the luxury of not hearing it. So, that’s a no. Mr. Stark wants him to face the nightmare, overcome it - he just doesn’t want to have to be present when Peter does. Of course, he doesn’t actually say that out loud though.

“Only if you want to. It doesn’t have to be tonight. Or ever, if you don’t think it’ll help,” Mr. Stark says. "Totally up to you."

Peter nods, flipping the case closed and pretending he doesn’t hear the sigh of relief that comes from across the table.

“Okay. Thank you, sir.”

“I should get going,” Mr. Stark stands up, reaching back down for his plate until Peter waves him off.

“You can leave it, I’ll clean up.”

“Right. ”

Mr. Stark heads towards the living room, stopping just behind Peter’s chair. For a second, it seems like he’s about to say something else, but instead he lays a hand on Peter’s shoulder and squeezes. Peter leans back just far enough to feel his hair brushing against Mr. Stark’s midsection, seeking out just the barest fraction of extra contact.

In the next moment Mr. Stark is gone, his voice drifting out from the living room as he says goodnight, thanking May for dinner before he leaves.

Peter holds the case in both hands like a talisman. It means something that Mr. Stark is giving him this, even if it’s not the thing he really wants.

He sets them back on the table and starts clearing up, bringing everything back into the kitchen, rinsing off the plates and bowls in the sink and sticking them in the dishwasher. The leftover ziti and garlic bread get wrapped up and stuck in the fridge for later.

When he goes out into the living room, glasses case back in hand, May is waiting on the couch, an open book in her lap.

She glances at the case, looking unimpressed. “He actually thinks he can fix everything with some new invention, doesn’t he?”

Peter shrugs. “Maybe he can.”

“Well, just in case he can’t,” May says, gesturing him in with one hand and setting her book aside with the other. “You know you can always talk to me, right?”

“Yeah, I know.”

Peter lets her pull him down onto the couch, leaning back against her, her arm wrapped around his shoulders. He turns the glasses case over and over in front of him, grateful that May doesn’t push it any further, at least not tonight. Instead, she turns on the TV, flicking through the channels.

_Prometheus_ is playing.

“Hey, remember - ”

Peter rolls his eyes and starts spelling before she can finish asking.

“X-E-N...”


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not that this should come as a surprise (at least, I don't think it is?) but there is some element of cheating here when Pete & Peter are together. I'm not adding a tag for it because I don't think this is what people would be looking for when they're searching out that tag? But I did want to give everyone a heads up.
> 
> (I also think that there are in-story reasons why the characters themselves wouldn't necessarily consider it cheating, mostly because Pete & Tony have never sat down to actually discuss whatever it is that they're doing together, and they both have reasons to believe the other person wouldn't or shouldn't consider it an exclusive relationship.)

* * *

“We might have a problem,” Pete says right off the bat as he climbs over the building ledge.

Peter holds up the BARF glasses case for him to see.

“Okay, maybe we don’t have a problem. How did you - ”

“He gave them to me.”

Pete settles down next to him. “Because of the stuff on Titan?”

“Yeah.”

“Have you used them? I mean, for that?”

Peter shakes his head.

“Do you want to?”

“Not really.”

Pete leans into his shoulder, reaching into his backpack and pulling out a brown paper bag.

“Chocolate croissants from Cannelle,” he explains. “I think they were supposed to be an apology for skipping out on dinner last night.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

“It’s not your fault. Yesterday it was babka french toast from somewhere else.”

“He’s gone a lot, isn’t he?”

“Yeah.”

It’s not that it feels good, knowing that Mr. Stark is just as much a big blank space in Pete’s life as he is in Peter’s - but it is oddly reassuring, to know that at least Peter’s not the only one being sidelined. Maybe Mr. Stark really is just that busy. 

That actually makes Peter feel worse, knowing that as busy as Mr. Stark must be, he’d still taken the time to stop by last night; trying to make sure Peter was dealing okay.

“I didn’t bring the second set today, since I couldn’t find the primaries,” Pete says, breaking the silence.

“That’s okay.”

They work their way through the rest of the croissants, neither of them talking much for a while. Peter licks a smudge of melted chocolate off his thumb, grinning when he looks up and catches Pete doing almost the same thing right next to him.

“Mr. Stark’s going out of town again tonight,” Pete says, after a few minutes. “If you wanted to come over and hang out for a while. Or stay over.”

Peter’s first reaction is that he can’t, but then he thinks about it. May would probably be relieved to think he was spending some time with Ned, and he knows Ned would cover for him, if Peter asked. 

Peter hasn’t been back to the penthouse since that first day. It’d be cool to go back there and just hang out. Take a night off from patrolling, try to relax for a little while.

He nods. “Yeah, let’s do it.”

*

Peter doesn’t feel great about asking Ned to lie for him, and he feels even less great asking him to lie so that Peter can go hang out with someone else, but Ned seems to take it all in stride because he’s an awesome best friend.

“Superhero stuff, right?”

“Sort of superhero adjacent,” Peter replies, hoping it’s good enough answer. Ned seems to think it is, nodding back at him. 

An hour later, Peter meets up with Pete in the lab and they head upstairs together.

“Do we have to worry about - ” Peter gestures towards the ceiling.

“FRIDAY? Nah, I already asked her to switch off monitoring. What do you want to do first?”

Peter looks around the penthouse. It looks almost exactly the same as the last time he was here.

“I dunno. What do you usually do when Mr. Stark isn’t around?”

“Uh, patrol, mostly.”

As awesome as it would be to go out on patrol with Pete, there’s no way they can do that without risking both May and Mr. Stark finding out. Besides the suit data, it’d definitely end up all over social media, one way or another.

“May thinks I’m taking the night off, she’d kill me if she found out I went out,” Peter says.

“I wasn’t actually suggesting it, I was just saying that’s usually what I do. If you brought the glasses we could do that, or we could just hang out and watch stuff in the TV room, or - um.” Pete blinks. “Wow, I just realized I’ve never actually had someone over before. That’s probably kind of sad, isn’t it?”

“You’ve had people over before, just not here. Hey, you guys have a jacuzzi downstairs, right?”

Pete grins. “Yeah. C’mon.”

Neither one of the bother with bathing suits - Peter because he hadn’t thought to bring one, and Pete because he doesn’t seem to care. Instead, Peter strips down to his boxers, sitting down on the side of the tub and letting his legs sink slowly into the water. He’s slightly taken aback when he notices that Pete has stripped down completely, stepping into the hot tub across from Peter buck naked like it’s something he does every day. 

...maybe it is.

The water feels amazing, and the view of the city out the windows is even better. Peter pushes himself forward on his hands, letting himself sink down into the tub until he’s submerged up to his shoulders.

“Oh man, that’s awesome,” he says, closing his eyes and tipping his head back. “I would do this like every single day if I were you.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever actually used it before.”

Peter opens his eyes. “Dude, why not?” 

Pete is still sitting on the edge of the tub, leaning back on his hands with his legs in the water. He shrugs.

“I dunno. It wasn’t like… ” he stops, and starts over. “Things weren’t good, when we first started staying here. The whole world was, I don’t know. There’s all this every day stuff you don’t think about until it stops working, you know? And a lot of stuff wasn’t working, because the people who made it work were just… gone. 

“So it wasn’t like ‘oh cool, crazy penthouse’ when I woke up here. It was just another place with a kitchen and a bed and a lab. I spent most of my time out patrolling, trying to help people, and Tony spent all his time in the lab.”

Peter can’t really imagine what that must have been like - well, he could, technically. He could experience it himself, If he put on glasses and Pete felt like sharing. But that’s a line that neither of them have crossed, without ever actually talking about it. Peter hasn’t ever shared his memories of Titan, and Pete has only very selectively shared memories of that period of time after the snap and before the world was knit back together again. 

It feels important, even if Peter can’t put a finger on why, exactly.

Pete is looking out at the city. The sun had set a little while ago, the sky a murky greenish-blue, lights just starting to come on in the windows of the hundreds of buildings below.

“Have you ever been drunk?” Pete asks out of nowhere.

“Uh, no.”

“Wanna try?”

Peter hesitates. “Won’t Mr. Stark notice if stuff is missing?”

“He might. If he does I’ll tell him I wanted to see what it did with my metabolism, but I don’t think he’s gonna ask. Odds are like fifty-fifty he even notices.”

Peter considers it. Not that he necessarily wants to get drunk like Pete is suggesting, but he’d be lying if he said he wasn’t curious. Besides, Pete’s excuse is sort of a good point - both of them should probably know how it affects them, and better to try it out here, in private, than at some party with a bunch of strangers sometime down the road (assuming Peter ever gets invited to those kinds of parties, that is).

But none of that is the real reason he’s tempted to try. 

He’s tired of being smart and responsible and reliable. He’s tired of feeling like he’s running all the time, caught between patrolling and school and trying not to worry May with how little he’s sleeping. It feels like this tug in his stomach; a desperate, lurking need to do something completely and utterly stupid. Something a dumb teenager might do, not an Avenger.

“Yeah,” he says. “I’ll try some, if you’re buying.”

“Technically, Tony’s buying,” Pete answers with a quick grin. “Be right back.”

And with that, Pete pulls his legs out of the water and slips back upstairs without bothering to get dressed. 

It leaves Peter alone in the silent gym, still a little dumbstruck at the idea that Pete walks around the penthouse naked like that. It’s not that Peter is super body shy or anything; he’s stripped down to his underwear to change into his suit in way too many alleys and random rooftops for that, but he’s never just like, walked around a huge apartment butt naked.

He wonders if it’s something Pete does all the time, or if maybe it’s just because Peter is the only one here. It’s not like it’s anything Peter hasn’t seen before, anyway.

Pete is back barely a minute later with two glasses and a bottle of something dark. He sets them down on the ledge and slips into the water beside Peter, both of them turning around to kneel on the bench, elbows resting on the edge of the tub.

“Are we supposed to put ice in it or something?”

“No idea,” Pete says, uncapping the bottle and pouring about an inch of liquor into each glass. “This is how Tony drinks it though.”

Peter picks up a glass, sniffing at it. He has no idea what good whiskey is supposed to smell like, but it does definitely smells like whiskey, he knows that much. He’s pretty certain it must be good stuff - no way Mr. Stark would buy anything else.

“Cheers,” he offers, holding up his glass towards Pete.

Peter returns the gesture and they both take take a sip. Peter gags almost immediately - the taste of it is overpowering. Pete is coughing beside him, sticking his tongue out like it’s personally offended him.

“Oh god, that’s gross,” Pete says.

Peter nods a bit frantically, clamping his mouth shut and face screwing up in distaste. 

“It doesn’t taste like that when... you know,” Pete says. 

Peter does know; second-hand at least. When Pete tastes whiskey on Mr. Stark’s lips, it tastes dark and sharp and just a little bit sweet. The drink itself is all sharpness though, making his lips tingle and his throat burn.

Pete is looking down at his glass, considering. Peter can actually see him steeling his resolve before he takes another sip, wincing as he swallows and then licking his lips.

“C’mere,” Pete says, tipping his chin forwards. “Wanna try something.”

Peter’s heart is pounding in his chest. He knows exactly what Pete is asking, bracing one hand against the edge of the tub as he leans in to press their lips together. 

It barely tastes like anything at all, just a quick touch of lips against lips, at least until Peter starts to pull away and feels Pete’s hand come up around the back of his neck, holding him in place and opening his mouth to deepen the kiss. Peter’s own mouth falls open of its own accord, tipping away for just a second to suck in a breath before leaning back into it.

It’s nothing like the borrowed memories of kissing Mr. Stark. 

For one thing, it’s infinitely more intense, to be present in the moment as opposed to just riding along in the passenger’s seat. For another, there’s no now-(almost)-familiar scratch of beard against his face, just smooth skin. It’s completely different, but just as perfect. Almost moreso for actually being real, rather than just someone else’s memory.

They both pull away at the same moment, breathing hard.

Pete looks away. 

“Sorry,” he says. “I think that stuff hit a lot faster than I expected it to.”

Peter’s not sure if that’s supposed to be an excuse, since it’s not like either of them have had that much yet, or even why Pete feels the need to apologize in the first place. But instead of asking, Peter picks up his own glass and takes another sip. This time it goes down a little easier - the burn of it more warm and heady instead of sharp and stinging. 

Maybe that’s the trick to it; it gets easier after that first taste.

Pete also takes another sip of the whiskey, tipping his head back to swallow.

“It’s actually not bad,” Peter says. “I mean, it’s not good, but it’s not awful.”

They’re both looking at each other. Peter doesn’t know what the rules are, if he should be asking the way Pete did or if he can just lean in again. 

Pete doesn’t seem to have the same reservations. He leans forward, pushing Peter back against the side of the tub and catching Peter’s mouth in another open-mouthed kiss.

Peter isn’t actually sure how long they spend like that, trading kisses back and forth, arms looped around each other’s shoulders, the combined heat of the water and the alcohol making them both loose-limbed and a little clumsy. At some point Peter finishes his glass and Pete pours him another, stealing a mouthful for himself before handing it over.

“Hey!” Peter objects, snorting with laughter. 

“Sorry, sorry. Here I can replace it, look,” Pete reaches back for the bottle but Peter grabs his hand before he can get there.

“Don’t, s’ok. That’s - this is enough. This is good.”

Pete’s head falls forward, chin dipping down towards his chest. 

“I think we might be drunk,” he says, earnestly.

“Mmm.”

Pete is kneeling with his legs on either side of Peter’s lap and his cheek resting against Peter’s shoulder. It feels nice. Everything feels nice, actually. Peter reaches up and strokes a hand through Pete’s hair, and is rewarded with a quiet hum in response. 

He feels Pete shift in front of him, and gasps when he feels lips latching onto the skin just above the hollow of his throat. The nerve endings there light up all at once, the sensation shooting straight to his dick.

“Oh, _fuck_ ,” Peter manages, and hears something that might be a snicker in response.

“Good, right?”

Pete knows, he realizes. Pete knows exactly how this feels - of course he does. They have the same body, after all. He probably knows every last sensitive spot, even ones Peter doesn’t even know about himself yet.

“Is this - ” Peter stops to swallow, “should we stop?”

“Drinking?” Pete asks, looking up.

“No, not that. We should probably stop that though too, I feel pretty weird. I meant the - uh, the touching.”

Pete sits up, leaning back. “Do you want to stop?”

There’s a long pause where neither of them speak, just sit eye to eye, looking at one another.

“Not really,” Peter answers, and is immediately rewarded with a grin.

“Good, then we don’t.”

Pete leans back in for another kiss; they’re closer than they were before, chests pressed together, cocks caught between their bodies. Pete rolls his hips forwards and Peter gasps, the heat and pressure and slip of the water making it feel like his senses are temporarily short circuiting.

“Holy _fuck_ ,” he breathes out, and then, “do that again.”

Pete does. 

They’re not exactly well-coordinated, but they don’t really need to be, not when every shift of their bodies against each other send pleasure sparking up and down Peter’s spine. Peter comes first, overwhelmed by how different it feels when it’s not just his own hand getting him off, and Pete isn’t far behind.

They collapse back in the water, breathing hard, Pete rolling off his lap to sprawl out beside him.

“Um,” Peter starts, because it feels like he’s supposed to say something. He stops though, because he has no idea what.

“Wanna go back upstairs?”

Peter looks down at his hand, which is starting to get super pruny looking. He nods.

They climb out of the tub and grab towels from a shelf over in the corner, picking up the whiskey bottle and glasses as they go. The air of the gym is cool against his skin, goosebumps prickling up along his arms and legs as they head back over to the elevator.

Pete nudges his shoulder just as the elevator dings.

“So, uh. Remind me later to look up how to clean come out of a jacuzzi. It’s not really the kind of thing I want ask FRIDAY.”

If Peter wasn’t otherwise occupied holding up his towel and the the two whiskey glasses, he would burying his face in his hands right now.

“Oh my god. We just came in Mr. Stark’s jacuzzi,” he says out loud, the reality starting to sink in.

“Dude, relax. It’s probably not even the first time that’s happened in that specific jacuzzi, which is actually sort of gross if you think about it. And even if it was, it’s not like Tony’s gonna be scandalized.” Pete pauses. “Well, okay, so if he knew it was the two of us together that might throw him for a loop. But I’m pretty sure once he got over the surprise, he’d be into it.”

Peter shifts on his feet, the tiles cold against his bare toes. He doesn’t know what to say to any of that. 

Pete seems to be sort of willfully ignorant about the difference between how Mr. Stark thinks of him verses how he thinks of Peter. Peter’s seen how Mr. Stark looks at Pete, at least in memories; it’s definitely not the same. 

Even if their bodies and their minds are the same in every way Peter can think of, it’s clearly not close enough.

Upstairs, the whiskey bottle is set back in its place and the glasses rinsed and put in the dishwasher. Peter grabs his backpack off the floor and pulls on some sweatpants and an old t-shirt in the media room while Pete heads off to the bedroom. He comes back dressed in sweats and a t-shirt as well.

“What do you want to watch?” Pete asks, reaching for the remote.

“Dunno. Anything’s good.”

He thinks the alcohol is starting to wear off; the sloppy, loose feeling from earlier replaced by something more restless and achy. Pete seems to notice, opening a small cabinet next to the couch and tossing Peter a bottle of water.

Peter downs half the bottle and feels better almost instantly - the restless feeling persists, but the achiness settles down to a barely noticeable thrum. He passes the bottle back to Pete, who finishes it.

“I guess this is what a hangover feels like,” he says when he’s done, wincing a bit.

“Yeah.” The floaty feeling had been nice, while it lasted, but Peter wasn’t much enjoying the aftermath.

Peter flops down next to Pete as he scrolls through their movie options.

He isn’t even sure what Pete ends up picking, except that he’s pretty sure it’s something he’s seen before but only vaguely remembers. Something about the combination of the low rumble of sound from the TV and Pete’s steady breathing close by pulls him under in a matter of minutes.

*

Peter actually sleeps through the night, which is different. 

When he wakes up, there’s a brown paper bag with fresh bagels sitting in the kitchen.Peter has a momentary freak out when he sees them on the counter. “Someone was here?”

“Nah, just a drone.”

Now that’s fully sober and well-rested, Peter realizes he should probably feel awkward about what they did yesterday. Jerking off next to each other was one thing, but rubbing off against his sort-of clone was something else entirely - or at least, it seems like it should be.

But then again, maybe not. Because Pete licks his lips and grins at him, both of them leaning over the kitchen island across from one another, and Peter has to grin back. Maybe he should feel awkward about it, but he doesn’t; not at all. Mostly he’s wondering how soon they can do it again, and without the alcohol this time.

“So, I have an idea,” Pete says.

Peter looks up. “Yeah?”

“We can’t really swing around together, not without Tony finding out. But there’s the gym downstairs. We could spar, if you want.”

Peter’s libido may have been hoping for something else, but yeah, he supposes that’s a good idea too. It’s a really good idea, actually. It’s been forever since Mr. Stark had put on his armor and offered to spend time training with Peter, not since before Titan.

“Yeah, let’s do it.”

Bagels demolished, they head back downstairs. As soon as they enter the room, Pete flips himself up onto the ceiling.

“Webs, or no webs?” he asks.

Peter thinks for a moment. “When is Mr. Stark supposed to get back?”

“Not until tonight. Plenty of time for everything to dissolve.”

“Webs, then.”

They don’t bother to set any other rules. 

It’s crazy; fighting someone who can match him speed for speed, strength for strength. All of the adrenaline rush of a real fight without any of the danger. It’s awesome.

He spends so much of his time carefully modulating his strength - he can’t go around punching pickpockets and car thieves at full force, not unless he wants to accidentally really hurt someone. The only times he’s really been able to go all out were times he didn’t like to think about that much, like trying to hold the ferry together that time. Or Titan. 

This is just pure fun, even when he’s getting tossed across the room. _Especially_ getting tossed across the room, when he uses the momentum and a quick web to slingshot himself back around towards Pete with a triumphant shout. 

They land in a tangle of limbs, rolling to a stop on the floor. Pete pins him down, catches his lips in a quick kiss, and then they’re off again.

Peter isn’t sure how long they spend sparring. His shoulder muscles are burning, his hair a sweaty mess, and Pete doesn’t look any better off. They end up sprawled out in the middle of the boxing ring, examining the frankly impressive array of webbing now criss-crossing the room all around them. 

“Man, imagine having to clean all of that up,” Peter says. 

Pete snickers. 

“Speaking of cleaning up,” Pete says, plucking his sweat-damp t-shirt away from his chest.

“Ugh, yeah.”

Pete rolls to his feet and offers Peter a hand to pull him up as well. The bathroom has one of those huge rainfall showers that Peter’s only seen in crazy nice hotels, like the one Mr. Stark put him in when they went to Germany. 

It’s still weird to think that Pete lives like this all the time - that he’s comfortable in it, used to it. But Peter guesses it makes sense. Pete’s been living here for over a year now, it’s his home; of course he feels comfortable.

Pete cranks on the water and they share the shower, stripping down and leaving their clothes on the floor outside the stall.

Peter leans in and kisses Pete under the spray. It feels exactly as good as Peter remembers from last night, licking his way inside Pete’s mouth. 

Pete’s shared a couple of memories that involved showers - they’re some of Peter’s personal favorites. Something about the way the water slightly muffled his hearing, pulling in the outer limits of his senses, and the way the steam and the heat would make the subtle scents of fresh clean water and Mr. Stark’s body wash all-encompassing.

Mr. Stark is taller than them - although not by much, really. And broader too. Not that Peter is comparing kissing Pete to kissing Mr. Stark, but it’s kind of hard not to think about it. Also, speaking of things being hard... yeah, that too.

Peter almost comes the moment he feels Pete’s hand wrap around his dick, and it takes a bit of clumsy maneuvering on his part before he can return the favor. It’s incredibly weird; exactly the same but different, the all-too-familiar slide of his dick in his fist but at an angle he’s (obviously) never felt before, both of them stroking just out of time with one another.

It doesn’t take long before they’re both coming, their heads tipped forward, leaning into one another, sated. 

*

As much as Peter loves hanging around at the tower, he doesn’t want to risk Mr. Stark coming back and catching him there. 

It’s bad enough that Mr. Stark barely looks at him now, Peter doesn’t want to think about how it would feel if Mr. Stark was actually angry at him for… doing whatever it is he and Pete have been doing. 

Plus, he promised Ned they would hang out today.

He gathers up his stuff and shoves it all in his backpack, making plans with Pete to meet up again during the week.

“Thanks for coming over,” Pete says, when they’re back down in the lab. “I kinda hate staying here alone when Tony’s gone, you know?”

Peter doesn’t know, not really. But he can definitely understand not wanting to be alone. It’s been a long time since he’s slept that well, or that long. Between the full night’s sleep and the crazy workout that morning, Peter actually feels pretty awesome.

It’s enough that even Ned seems to notice a change, by the time Peter makes it back across town. Peter hesitates when Ned asks about it.

“There’s this thing,” Peter starts. He has no idea how to continue. 

Ned is his friend, his _best_ friend, and he covered for Peter last night so Peter could go hang out with Pete. Which feels like a pretty shitty thing to do to his friend, now that he thinks about it. 

Ned deserves to know. 

At least, if Peter can figure out how to explain it.

“Is it a bad thing?” Ned asks. “Should I be calling my mom to warn her I might disappear again?”

“No! No, it’s nothing like that, I swear.”

Ned looks relieved. “Oh, then okay. Anything else can’t be that bad, then, right? Just tell me. I know something’s been going on with you.”

“I want to, I just - it’s kind of complicated.”

Ned waits. Peter knows it must be killing him not to ask.

“So, um, Mr. Stark cloned me,” Peter blurts out. Okay, so. Maybe not actually all that complicated.

“Dude, _what?_ ”

“Yeah. I mean, sort of? He used my DNA like a blueprint, and he has this machine that basically prints live tissue - that’s super classified, by the way, please don’t tell anyone I told you about that. I don’t think I’m even supposed to know.”

It only takes Ned a couple minutes of gaping-mouthed shock to start putting the pieces together.

“The other Spider-Man, the one in Manhattan - that’s not just a copycat, that’s actually _you_? Or another version of you?”

“Yeah.”

“Holy crap dude. That’s so cool.”

Peter has to smile at that. Yeah, it is pretty cool, even if everything else is all messed up and complicated. It occurs to him that this is exactly why he and Ned are friends.

“Wait, why did Stark clone you? Did he need another you to help the team save everyone? Did he clone anyone else?”

“No, and no. At least, not that I know of.”

“Man, if I had a clone I could stay home whenever I wanted and play Shadowbringers all day. Think of how much faster we’d be able to level up.”

That’s definitely one way to look at it.

“Is he cool? Or is it just weird, having someone else say all the same things you were about to say? Wait - is this why you act kind of weird sometimes? Have I met him already?”

“No! You haven’t met him, we haven’t done anything like that, I promise.”

Peter’s not sure why or how the possibility hasn’t occurred to him before now. It’s like the oldest prank in the book. Not that either he or Pete have been in much of a pranking mood.

“Can I meet him?” Ned has apparently already blown past being worried about possibly being tricked, and he’s right back to stoked.

“Uh, yeah, probably.”

“ _Awesome_.”

“You’re not freaked out?”

“No. On a scale of things to freak out about, you having a secret clone is pretty far down on the list, since that list includes stuff like ‘oh hey everyone, aliens are invading New York again.’ Besides, I have twice as many best friends now! Unless he’s like, secretly a jerk. He’s not secretly a jerk, is he?”

“No, he’s not a jerk.”

“Good. ‘Cause that would suck. How much did May freak when she found out?”

Peter tries to disguise a wince, but Ned catches it.

“She doesn’t know?! Oh my god, Peter. How do you hide something like that? I mean, okay, hiding Spider-Man is one thing - and even that didn’t actually last all that long - but there’s literally another you running around the city right now. What if they bump into each other?”

Embarrassingly enough, Peter hasn’t actually ever thought about that. Pete is a close enough match that it probably wouldn’t be too bad… at least until May noticed that Pete was wearing clothing she didn’t recognize, or didn’t remember something she told him the day before. 

Okay, so possibly that wouldn’t go so well.

On the other hand, Pete mainly stays in Manhattan anyway. And it’s not like May avoids Manhattan, but it’s also not like she’s there on a daily basis. Even if she was, Manhattan’s a big place, something like two million people live there, the odds of them running into one another must be pretty small.

“May can’t find out,” Peter says. “Okay? She’d have all these questions about how it happened that would be really hard to answer.”

“Like why Tony Stark cloned you in the first place?”

“Yeah, like that.”

“So... why did he?”

“Kinda hard to answer, remember? It’s complicated.”

Peter knows the explanation that Pete had given; that hadn’t been complicated. Not really. But he can’t really believe it’s all that simple, that Mr. Stark copied him just because he missed Peter that much.

The very thought of it is enough to make Peter feel dizzy and a little bit sick - Mr. Stark, coming back to Earth half-starved, defeated, shutting himself away from what was left of the team. Peter can’t fully wrap his head around what that must have been like, or if any one, all-encompassing answer even existed for why Mr. Stark had done what he did.

But he does know there’s no way he can explain any of it to Ned.

Thankfully, Ned has already moved on. 

“You said I get to meet him though, right?”

“Yeah, of course.”

Pete hasn’t said anything, but Peter has to assume that by now Pete has enough shared memories of Ned to feel like he knows him just as well as Peter does, which also means he must miss hanging out together.

Everything else in Peter’s life might be complicated, but at least this one thing could be simple.

*

He pitches the idea to Pete the following Saturday.

“You told Ned?” Pete says, surprised.

“Well, yeah.”

“Wow, we kind of suck at keeping secrets.”

“I didn’t want to keep lying to him about what I was doing. Besides, I thought you might, you know, want to hang out with him.”

“I do! But - ” Pete looks away, shrugging one shoulder. “I didn’t want you to feel like you had to share him. I know it’s not my life.”

Oh.

It’s hard not to go there; not to imagine for a moment waking up one day with half his memories gone and knowing that someone else has a claim to his spot on the couch next to May, and someone else is Ned’s first call when there’s some new Star Wars movie rumor making the rounds.

He gets why Pete tries not to bring it up, the ache of it settling deep in Peter’s chest. It’s so easy to ignore when they’re laughing at old memories (or jerking off to newer ones) together, but it never really goes away.

“It still sort of is,” he says. “Maybe not in the present, but the past is still both of our pasts.”

“Yeah, exactly. It’s the past,” Pete says.

“If you don’t want to meet him that’s fine, if you think it’ll make things harder. But he’s gonna be disappointed. And also probably kind of insulted that you think his friendship is like, a limited resource.”

Pete looks up. “You really don’t mind?”

“I really don’t.”

“Okay, yeah. Let’s do it.”

A quick call to Ned confirms that he’s got the house to himself that afternoon, and soon enough he and Pete are catching the subway back to Queens. 

Peter is giddy at the prospect of introducing the two of them, although he realizes that it only sort of counts as an introduction at all. They already know each other.

*

“No way.”

“Dude, are you okay?” Peter has to ask.

“No _freaking_ way!”

Ned reaches out with both hands, poking them both in the chest. 

“I thought you already told him…” Pete says.

“I did.”

“Yeah, he told me, but this - this is crazy! Dude, there’s two of you! He even has your weird eyebrow, look.”

Peter reaches up to run a finger over his left brow, suddenly self conscious. He only notices a second later that Pete is doing the same thing right beside him, while Ned looks like he’s about to self combust on the spot.

He’s not sure exactly what happens, but in the next moment Ned and Pete are hugging. Pete has his eyes shut tight, hugging Ned in what looks very similar to the way Peter had the first time they’d seen one another after snapping back into existence.

“Oh my god, I missed you so much,” Pete says, quietly.

“You missed me,” Ned repeats, like he’s still trying to wrap his head around it. “Wait, do you go to school? You should come to Midtown. Peter and I can catch you up on classes, don’t worry about that, it’ll be great. Although I guess it would be kind of a commute from Manhattan. You live in Manhattan, right?”

Pete snorts out a laugh at the barrage of questions, but answers easily enough. “No, I don’t go to school. Tony had to pull some strings to make up all my ID stuff, so on paper I’m nineteen and unsnapped. And yeah, I live in Manhattan.”

“That’s awesome.”

“He doesn’t just live in Manhattan, he lives in the penthouse at the tower,” Peter feels obligated to point out.

“In the _Avengers_ tower? No way.” Ned is back to repeating things. “Is it awesome? Does Banner really eat Wheaties for breakfast every morning, or was that just a marketing thing? Oh and how does Thor braid his beard like that - does he do it himself, or does he have someone do it for him?”

“Um, it’s not really like that. Thor went back to New Asgard for a little bit, and then I think he went back to space? No one really stays at the tower, except for me and Tony.”

“My best friend is Tony Stark’s roommate,” Ned says slowly, his voice filled with wonder.

Pete opens his mouth to object, but Peter nudges him. Nothing either of them say is going to convince Ned otherwise, now that he’s latched onto the idea.

It is pretty ridiculous to think of it like that. Roommates. Like they have a chore wheel and leave each other passive aggressive sticky notes on the fridge. Okay, so most of Peter’s understanding about adult roommate situations comes from the Big Bang Theory and old reruns of Friends. Maybe that’s not how it actually works in real life.

It’s definitely not how it works with Pete and Mr. Stark though. Peter is pretty sure roommates don’t usually share a bed, or clothes, and sometimes a shower. There’s a very different word for that sort of relationship.

Peter pushes the thought aside.

As expected, Ned has a ton more questions for them, most of which Pete and Peter can answer without straying into dangerous territory.

It’s actually pretty great, hanging out with Ned and Pete all afternoon. They play video games together - but only after Pete and Peter solemnly swear not to use their ‘freaky clone powers’ to cheat. Which sort of happens anyway, because it’s not really Peter’s fault that his superpowered reaction times give him (er, both of him) an unfair advantage.

Plus, it’s hard not get competitive, given the opportunity to play against someone who has the exact same advantage. They’re both honor-bound to play with only their left hands, after that. Which is a struggle, but an entertaining one.

Peter and Pete both freeze mid-game when they hear a car pull into the driveway.

“What?” Ned asks, looking back and forth between them.

“Your mom,” Peter explains as he hears the front door open. 

Pete glances over at the bedroom window and then back, and Peter nods in agreement. Without a word, Pete gives Ned a quick sidelong hug and then slips out the window. Peter hears a soft thud as his feet hit the ground outside.

“I should go too,” Peter says.

Ned nods. “Tell Pete we should hang out again sometime, okay?”

“Yeah.”

Peter goes out through the front, only stopping for a quick hello and goodbye to Ned’s mom as he leaves. Pete is waiting for him on the sidewalk about halfway down the block, a baseball cap pulled down low over his face.

The same ache from before comes back in full force at the sudden reminder that Pete can’t even hang out with Ned without needing to hide. It must show on his face, because Pete looks over at him, perplexed.

“Sorry,” Peter says. “It just sucks you have to sneak around like that.”

“Oh. I sort of got used to it, I guess, having to hide. And I lived for a whole year in a world where Ned wasn’t even alive anymore, so having to sneak around a little bit to hang out with him doesn’t seem like such a big deal.”

Peter can’t really imagine it, and he doesn’t want to try, either. He changes the subject instead.

“See you next Saturday?”

“Yeah, see you.”

They split up, Pete heading back towards the subway station and Peter opting to walk home, since it’s not as far for him. 

For a few minutes, he lets himself imagine a life where Pete didn’t have to leave, where they could both go back to the apartment and eat dinner with May. 

They could go patrolling together sometimes - not all the time, because it would be better to split up and cover more ground, but every once in a while would be fun. They’d hang out in the lab and work on stuff together, and maybe Peter wouldn’t care as much if Mr. Stark skipped out on every lab session, if he wasn’t alone.


	6. Chapter 6

Peter can’t get out of his head just how relieved and happy Pete had looked when he’d seen Ned the other day. 

The thing is, Pete hadn’t had any reason to miss Ned like that until Peter gave him all those memories. And yeah okay, Pete had asked for the memories, had wanted them, but that doesn’t mean Peter doesn’t feel like crap about it, knowing that Pete now misses his best friend every day in part because of him.

“You’re quiet tonight. What’s going on?” May asks him over dinner that night.

“Nothing.”

“Uh huh. I feel like ‘nothing’ is always something with you.”

“I’m fine, just tired,” he says.

They finish dinner and clean up mostly in silence, May seeming to realize that Peter isn’t ready to talk. She’s right. Peter doesn’t even know how to put any of it into words. Not Pete, not the memories from Titan, not the near-constant ache of loneliness he’s felt ever since coming back.

There’s no way Pete doesn’t miss May. And Ben, and Mom and Dad. 

Peter climbs into bed early that night, but doesn’t try to go to sleep right away. Instead, he stares at his phone, at the blinking cursor of an empty text. He has Mr. Stark’s personal number now, he could text him - tell him he hasn’t used the glasses yet, that he both does and doesn’t want to. That he can’t face revisiting Titan alone.

But Peter knows Mr. Stark is busy - barely a week goes by without some news report about the stuff he’s doing all over the world. Meetings with world leaders and huge multinational clean energy initiatives, UN summits and press conferences and spearheading the rebuilding of the Compound. 

The rebuilding of the whole world, really. 

Half the people on Earth had been dusted just like Peter had, and they were all coping without needing some crazy cutting-edge piece of tech and Mr. Stark - at least, hypothetically - standing by for moral support.

He shoves the phone under his pillow; out of sight, out of mind.

The glasses are sitting on his nightstand, still in their case. He puts them on - but not for Titan. Not for any of his own memories, actually. He searches back through the memories that Pete has shared with him until he finds the one he needs. That first one Pete had shown him, of the two of them together in bed: Mr. Stark’s arm wrapped around Peter’s stomach, every exhale of his breath tickling the fine hair on the back of Peter’s neck. 

It’s not quite the same as real, it’s a memory of a memory; like seeing a reflection of a reflection through a slightly fogged mirror, but it’s as close as he can get.

It’s close enough that he can fall asleep.

*

“You should meet May, too,” Peter blurts out the next time they meet up.

They’re perched up in the rafters of an abandoned warehouse, sharing a can of soda and watching rain pour in through a hole in the ceiling on the far side of the building.

“Uh, I don’t think May is going to be nearly as cool as Ned was about the whole clone thing.”

“So we don’t tell her you’re a clone.”

Pete blinks. “Dude, I think she’s going to have some questions if she suddenly has twice as many nephews.”

“That’s not what I’m saying. C’mon, I know Tony must’ve loaded The Parent Trap in there somewhere,” Peter says, reaching out to tap Pete on the forehead. Pete tips his head back, grinning, then grabs Peter’s hand and pulls it away from his face. 

The grin fades, but he doesn’t let go of Peter’s hand.

“You want me to pretend to be you?” Pete sounds surprised. It’s not the reaction Peter had been expecting; the whole thing had made a perfect kind of sense when he’d thought about it that morning.

“Well, yeah,” Peter replies, shrugging. “All those memories, I mean - you remember her for real now. I - if it were me, I know I’d be missing her.”

Pete hesitates for a moment, then nods silently.

“Okay, so, if it were me, I’d want to be able to see her. Since Ned’s already in on it, I can go stay over at his place for a night - ”

“Or you could go stay with Tony,” Pete interjects.

For all his thinking and planning, Peter… hadn’t actually considered that. He’d mostly been thinking about Pete and May, figuring they’d pick a night when Mr. Stark was supposed to be out of town and wouldn’t notice Pete’s absence.

“I - yeah, I guess I could?” Peter says, a little faintly.

The surprise has faded and now there’s a glint of amusement in Pete’s expression. 

“Only if you wanted to.”

“If I wanted to,” Peter parrots back, thinking. 

It was one thing to relive memories, it was another thing entirely to think about actually being there. To have Mr. Stark look at him the way Peter knows he looks at Pete, without a thousand miles of space between them. 

_If I wanted to_. As if it was even a question.

“You’d have to cut your hair,” Pete says, seeming to mull things over.

“Yeah. We’d have to swap clothes too, otherwise May and Mr. Stark will both probably notice.”

“And you’d have to practice calling him Tony.”

Yeah, that’s really the very least of the things Peter would have to worry about, if they were actually considering this. He’s seen enough memories by now to know that Mr. Stark - _Tony_ , will definitely catch on if Peter freezes up the moment they touch, overwhelmed by the sensory input. 

Pete’s already used to it. He gets overwhelmed too, sometimes, but he doesn’t totally freeze up the way Peter suspects he might in the same situation.

“I’m thinking I’d have to practice a few other things too,” Peter says, trying desperately to ignore the flush he can feel spreading across his face. “If we’re expecting Mr. Stark not to notice.”

Pete raises an eyebrow in question, and then it seems to dawn on him. 

“Oh. Ohhhh. Um, yeah probably that too.”

Peter swallows. “We don’t have to. It’s not like we have to do one to do the other.”

“Up to you. But yeah, I do want to see May. As… as long as it’s okay with you.”

“It’s definitely okay with me.”

“And the other thing?”

Peter hesitates. He wants to, of course he wants to, but it’s just. It’s a lot. Maybe it would be easier to get over this thing of his if he stopped. Stopped reliving the memories, stopped asking Pete to share bits and pieces of information about what it’s like, stopped even considering trying to steal one night of that for himself. But that same niggling thought won’t leave him alone: _Why him?_

Or, more precisely: _Why him and not me?_

If Peter really was standing there in Pete’s place, would Mr. Stark even know the difference? And if he did, how? What specific detail would be the tipping point? Peter needs to know, to understand. As bad of an idea as this probably is, he wants to know for himself exactly where and how he falls short.

“We can start slow,” Pete suggests.

Yeah. Yeah that sounds reasonable. Starting slow isn’t committing to anything. Pete licks his lips, leaning forward and then pausing, waiting for Peter to decide. 

Peter meets him halfway.

He leans back against the support beam, bringing one hand up behind him to pull himself and Pete to standing. The beam below is just wide enough to stand on comfortably - neither one of them worried about falling. Pete presses their bodies together, rolling his hips against Peter until Peter has to turn away to gasp.

“Wait - I’m gonna - ”

“Don’t,” Pete says. “Focus on the kiss.”

“Yeah, I don’t think that’s gonna help.”

Pete kisses the underside of his jaw. “It will. Remember when we first got bit, before we could filter stuff out?”

Of course he does. He and Pete had experienced the memory together, just a few weeks back.

“Not really the same thing,” Peter says.

“It is.”

“It took me like a week before I could go outside without freaking out. May thought I had the flu. _I_ thought I had the flu.”

“Yeah, and it’ll take some time to get used to it, just like it did then. Gets easier with practice, trust me.”

Practice, right. 

And Pete knows this because he’s had like, hundreds of hours of practice with Mr. Stark, the two of them stretched out together, naked in bed. Mr. Stark’s hands touching him everywhere and - o _h._ Oh god. Peter’s hips stutter and he squeezes his eyes shut tight as he comes. That probably hadn’t the best thing to think about when he was supposed to be trying not to come.

To make things worse, Pete is laughing. 

Not full-out laughter, but more sort of quietly snickering. Still though. Peter pinches his side in retaliation and Pete yelps, swatting Peter’s hand away. 

“I’m not laughing at you,” Pete objects, still laughing, the words coming out a bit breathless.

“Yes you are.”

“Okay, yeah I am, but only a little bit. Dude, been there done that. Don’t be embarrassed about it. Tony likes it, anyway.”

Peter’s brain sort of fizzles out. 

“What?”

“I mean, not the premature ejaculation part exactly,” Pete says and Peter winces, “but the oversensitivity thing, he likes that a lot. Plus, you know - ”

Pete slips a hand between their bodies, cupping Peter through his jeans. It’s actually pretty sticky and gross right now, but the touch has the intended effect regardless. 

Peter groans.

“That,” Pete says.

Pete pulls his hand away, his point made, although Peter is still trying to work his way through it. It was one thing to go along for the ride in a memory, it was another thing to have Pete spelling out things that Mr. Stark likes about his body. Well, about Pete’s body. 

Which is virtually indistinguishable from Peter’s.

Peter purses his lips together, swallowing.

“Ready to try again?” Pete asks.

Peter licks his lips and nods, leaning his head back against the rafter.

“Good. ‘Cause for the record, Tony isn’t going to give you time to recover. He likes to just keep going, so if you need to stop you need to say so.”

“Right.”

Pete steps back into him, bringing their lips together again. It’s a little slower this time, softer and drawn out, and Peter feels marginally more in control. It still isn’t very long before he’s desperately rolling his hips forward to rub against Pete’s body. 

Pete breaks away, reaching up to tangle his hand through Peter’s hair.

“You’re doing really good,” he says in a low whisper.

Peter digs his nails into the rafter behind him at the praise, and hears the faint sound of metal groaning in protest. Pete slips his hands down to Peter’s wrists, prying them away from the rafter with a lopsided grin.

“No leaving dents in the furniture.”

Peter flexes both hands into fists and then forces them to relax. 

“Tony doesn’t like that?” he asks, only half joking.

“No, he probably does. It’s just, it seems kinda rude to wreck his stuff. Plus I think that beam is the only thing holding up this side of the roof.”

Peter looks up. Oh. Yeah, that.

Pete tugs Peter’s hands forward a bit, settling them on his hips.

“You should bring the glasses next time,” Pete murmurs, leaning down to suck at the skin just above Peter’s collarbone.

Peter’s hands clench on Pete’s hips as he lets his head thunk back against the rafter.

“Uh huh,” he says, already forgetting what it was he’s meant to be agreeing to.

He winds up getting a whole lot of practice that afternoon. Enough that when he finally does leave the warehouse his lips feel tingly and sore, the rest of his body loose and a little bit giddy. He can’t wait to do it again. Maybe someplace a little more comfortable, where they can do more than just kiss. 

Just kissing was good though too. Really, anything was good.

*

“Should we get burner phones?” Ned asks, before he even says hi the next morning. “I think we should get burner phones. You know, so you and me and our _other friend_ can text without anyone finding out.”

As secret codes go, it’s not subtle.

“I don’t think we need to get burner phones.”

Ned lowers his voice. “Are you sure? What if we want to hang out? Or what if he needs a guy-in-the-chair?”

Peter doesn’t say it out loud, but he can’t help thinking that if Pete ever needs a guy-in-the-chair, he has FRIDAY on call. Not to mention Tony Stark himself, probably. 

“I’ll ask him about it next time.”

It’s not a bad idea, really. Peter’s not sure that he and Ned need secret phones, plus it’s not like either of them are exactly rolling in spare cash to go buy them, but it would be pretty cool if Pete could text them both whenever. 

The band room is empty this time of day, so Peter and Ned duck inside to talk.

“So what do you guys do when you meet up anyway?”

Peter chokes. “Uh - what? Nothing. We don’t do anything.”

“Oooh. Superhero stuff you can’t talk about, right? I get it.”

“No, it’s not that. I mean yeah, we train together sometimes, but mostly we just talk about stuff.” 

Talking, yeah. 

Like Pete talking about how handsy Mr. Stark was all the time (‘ _He’s gonna touch you, like, a lot. So just, be prepared for that.’_ ) or how Peter might want to get used to sleeping naked (‘ _Dude, I can’t do that! What if May walks in?!’_ ).

Peter shakes his head to clear it. Not the kind of thing he should be thinking about mid-conversation with Ned.

“That’s so cool. I bet you guys can like, finish each other’s sentences and stuff. Imagine how awesome that would be in a fight! Like, you have another you there who can do the thing you would do if you had a second set of hands, and you don’t even have to say anything because he’d already be right there, doing it!”

It takes a couple seconds to parse that, but Peter has to nod. Yeah, sparring together had been awesome. Fighting on the same side would probably be even better, not that they’ve had the chance to try it out yet. 

Until something changes, or unless something really big attacks the city, they probably won’t have the chance. Peter could definitely do without anything huge attacking the city though.

In the meantime, he needs to make sure Ned’s on board with their plan. Or at least, part of the plan.

“Hey, you know how you asked about us switching places?”

“Yeah?”

“Well, we’re going to try it. I’m not sure when yet, but we’re probably gonna need your help when we do. Okay?”

Ned grins. “Totally.”

“Great. Thanks.”

*

Mr. Stark actually shows up to the lab that week, which throws Peter for a loop until he remembers - right, May probably had something to do with that. Knowing that he’s probably only there because May yelled at him or something isn’t a great feeling. Peter’s suspicions are only further confirmed when the first thing Mr. Stark does is ask how his aunt is doing.

“She’s fine,” Peter replies, at a loss for what else he can say. “How are you, sir?”

Peter winces internally. God, what is wrong with him, why did that come out sounding so formal? Pete never talks like that when he’s with Mr. Stark, and Mr. Stark never seems to mind. 

Meanwhile, Mr. Stark is looking at Peter like he’s also wondering what the hell is wrong with him.

“Can’t complain,” Mr. Stark says. “Actually I can, but I’m trying not to.”

“Oh.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

Mr. Stark doesn’t ask about the glasses, and Peter opts not to bring them up. He doesn’t want to give them back, and he’s afraid that if he admits he’s never going to use them for Titan then Mr. Stark is going to ask for them back. And it’s not like Peter can explain why he needs them, otherwise.

They work together, and for a while it’s almost like it was before - pitching ideas back and forth, testing things out; the way Mr. Stark’s eyebrow will quirk up when Peter comes up with a good idea.

One thing becomes really clear though: Pete is definitely wrong about Mr. Stark liking to touch him.

He keeps his distance from Peter - not a huge amount of space, since they’re both still working at the same station, but enough that Peter is aware of it, like a physical barrier between them. Mr. Stark reaches out to squeeze Peter’s shoulder exactly once, the pressure there and gone so quickly Peter has barely processed what’s happening before it’s over. 

Peter throws himself back into the work, hoping maybe a little stupidly that if he works hard enough he might earn another brief moment of contact, another chance to feel solid and present in a way that’s become unfamiliar since Titan.

He doesn’t manage it. 

Mr. Stark likes his ideas, is impressed with his work - he even says so. But he doesn’t offer Peter anything more than a strained smile and a wave when it’s time for Peter to head home for the night.

*

The following Saturday the first thing Pete does is pass Peter two eggs, one in each hand. 

“You’re joking, right?”

“You left bruises on me last time. It’s fine on me, ‘cause we heal fast. But Tony doesn’t, so...”

“So what, you never leave bruises?” 

Peter realizes a moment too late he doesn’t actually want an answer to that.

Pete shrugs. “I do sometimes, but like, only on purpose. And at first I definitely did by accident a lot, but Tony didn’t really seem to care back then. I don’t even know if he noticed, actually.”

Peter passes the eggs back over, determined not to think about Pete’s answer too closely, at least not until later. 

“You first, then,” he says.

Pete rolls his eyes. “Fine, whatever.”

They’re in another abandoned building - an old duplex with a few pieces of furniture left behind. Peter and Pete are sitting on the floor in one of the empty upstairs bedrooms, their backpacks tossed in a corner nearby. Peter pushes up to his knees, swinging one leg over Pete’s lap and settling down again.

Pete’s hands are otherwise occupied holding the eggs, so Peter takes the lead, cupping Pete’s head in his hands and pulling him in.

They kiss for a long time, Peter rocking his hips slowly against Pete’s lap. It’s a little easier to stay in control, Peter finds, being on top like this. He can slow down, stop for breath when he needs to. Everything is a little less overwhelming than it’d been that first time.

Pete’s grip on the eggs never falters or tightens, at least as far as Peter can tell. It’s a little bit annoying, actually. Peter scratches his nails through Pete’s hair as he grinds down, trying to get a rise out of him. Pete flashes him a brilliant smile, balancing the eggs on the pads of his pointer fingers.

“Showoff,” Peter says.

“Maybe a little.”

Pete is definitely hard underneath him - Peter can feel it through their jeans. He shifts back an inch, snaking a hand between their bodies and then pausing to look up at Pete.

“Can I?”

Pete licks his lips, mouth falling open again as he nods. “Yeah.”

It’s weird, unzipping Pete’s pants and pulling out his dick - so familiar but also not at the same time. Pete arches up into the touch, his hips twitching up off the floor. He’s not playing around balancing the eggs on his fingertips anymore.

Peter jerks Pete off the way he likes it best, the way he’s witnessed Mr. Stark ( _Tony_ ) do it plenty of times now, thanks to the glasses. His own cock is uncomfortably hard in his pants, at least until he decides, screw it _,_ and fumbles down his own zipper, jacking off with both hands in tandem until they come at nearly the same instant.

Peter doesn’t miss the telltale _crack_ of an eggshell breaking.

He grins wide against Pete’s mouth. 

Pete brings the egg up close to examine it. 

“A hairline crack,” he says. “Not broken.”

“Uh huh.”

“Tony’s not literally made of eggshells anyway. Let’s see how you do with it.”

The cracked egg gets set aside and traded for a new one ( _You bought a dozen, seriously?_ Peter asks, and Pete shrugs) and they swap places. 

Peter lasts a whole three minutes before he has two hands full of gooey, broken eggs. 

“Ugh, gross.” He holds his hands out to either side, dripping yolk on the dust-streaked floor. “Please tell me you also brought paper towels?”

“Better.” Pete webs his bag over and pulls out a couple of wet wipes.

Peter frowns, wiping up his hands and the floor as best he can. “Not that I’m not glad you did, but I think I’m insulted you came that prepared.”

“I didn’t say this was gonna be easy.”

Peter does get better, with practice. Focusing on the eggs actually helps him last a little longer, he thinks, although he doesn’t want to ask Pete for confirmation on that. It’s still pretty embarrassing. He and Pete have the same bodies, the same senses; there’s no reason Peter shouldn’t be able to hold out with just as much control as Pete has.

Well, except for the obvious. 

It’s not like Peter lives under a rock. He knows Mr. Stark has been around. Like, a lot. Mr. Stark probably has more experience than Peter can even imagine, and Pete’s been sleeping with him for over a year now. Of course Pete’s gonna be better at this. Peter has to wonder if he even has a chance at catching up. It doesn’t seem like it.

When he does finally bring it up, Pete rolls his eyes. 

“Dude, if what he wanted was experience he could’ve gone for literally anyone else. It would’ve been easier than recreating you from scratch.”

“Did he - ”

No, Peter isn’t going to ask. As much as he might want to know.

“Did he what?”

“Nevermind.”

“You can ask me whatever, you know. I may not know the answer, but I’m not gonna get offended or anything. You shared all those memories with me. It’s only fair.”

Peter picks at a loose thread on his jeans. They’re sitting side by side on the floor, leaning back against the wall, taking a break.

“Did he... when he made you, did he change anything? I know we look the same, and I think we’re the same in most other ways too, but like, he had the chance to make you however he wanted. So I just wonder sometimes, what he might have made different, since he could.” 

_What he would change about me to make me good enough, if he had the chance_.

“He didn’t change anything,” Pete says, after a long moment. “He wanted me to be an exact copy of you, or as close as he could make me. I think it would’ve been a lot easier if he hadn’t, actually. You know I didn’t even have a body at first, right?”

That pulls Peter up short. 

“Wait, really? How…?”

“Yeah. I was kinda like FRIDAY, just hanging out in his lab at the cabin upstate. I could talk to FRIDAY and DUM-E and like, the 3D printer and the coffee machine, but I couldn’t physically do anything. It really sucked, and I kept complaining and asking him when I could go out and patrol, even though I knew he really didn’t want me to. FRIDAY kept asking me not to bring it up.

“Anyway, if he wanted to change anything about you, I think it would’ve been then. He could’ve programmed me to stop asking or something like that, but instead he nearly drove himself nuts figuring out how to make a body that was the same as yours, because he knew you would never be happy being stuck inside when there were people out there that needed help.”

It’s way too much, to think about Mr. Stark having that much faith in him, even after - well, after.

“Would you even know though, if he had changed something?”

“Maybe not. But I think you would,” Pete says.

Peter’s not sure how much he trusts that - not that he doubts Pete, but he doubts his own ability to spot the differences. Pete was based off whoever he’d been before Titan, after all, and Peter wasn’t the same person anymore.

There had to be a difference though, whether Mr. Stark had meant there to be one or not; that much Peter knew for certain.

*

Peter jerks off that night to thoughts of leaving bruises scattered across Mr. Stark’s chest, like a kid carving their initials into a signpost: _I was here_.

He imagines Mr. Stark not caring about the marks; or even better, liking them. Liking that Peter was maybe just a little bit out of control and overenthusiastic, sometimes sloppy with excitement. 

He wouldn’t, in real life. Peter’s not an idiot, he knows that. 

But hey, that’s exactly what fantasies are for, aren’t they?

He imagines Mr. Stark grinning down at him, telling him to wreck the furniture if he wants, because Mr. Stark likes that Peter is strong, that sometimes he bends silverware in half without noticing when he’s worried about an upcoming test.

He imagines sitting on one of the stools in the lab with Mr. Stark standing right behind him. Leaning back against the man’s body while they work together, Mr. Stark whispering praise in his ear whenever he gets something right.

Peter comes with one fist shoved against his mouth to muffle the sound.

Some combination of his fantasies and the conversation with Pete lead to strange dreams, later that night. 

Ones where Peter is stretched out on one of the tables in the lab, like what they do with one of his suits when they need to fix something. Tony ( _Mr. Stark_ ) trailing a hand over his chest and asking FRIDAY to change this or that, parts of Peter’s body morphing to comply.

Peter is immobilized, and achingly hard as Mr. Stark idly manipulates his penis until it fits perfectly in the palm of his hand.

“Hmm, better,” Mr. Stark says, letting go, and Peter lets out a high-pitched whine. 

Mr. Stark frowns at the noise. 

“FRI, I thought we fixed that?”

Whatever FRIDAY says in response comes out garbled, or maybe it’s just Peter who can’t understand it, because Mr. Stark seems to understand perfectly, nodding in response to whatever it is she’s saying.

Mr. Stark grabs a rag off of the workbench somewhere down by Peter’s feet and starting wiping off his hands as he continues talking to FRIDAY, only some of which Peter can understand. 

When he’s done, he tosses the rag down on Peter’s stomach.

“Alright, you know what? Scratch this one. We’ll start fresh tomorrow.”

 _Don’t!_ Peter tries to yell. 

_I’m still here, I’m right here!_

But Mr. Stark can’t hear him. He turns off the lights as he leaves, and Peter can feel something happening to his body, starting at his toes and working its way upwards. It’s not so much a feeling of something as a lack of feeling anything at all. 

He can’t see his feet in this position and he can’t shift his head to look, but he knows with dead certainty they must be gone.

Peter wakes up gasping for air, his fists clenched so hard in the sheets that he’s ripped holes in them.

*

Peter does his best not to think about the dream, but the sense-memory of it creeps in at odd moments, reminding him what it was like to scream and scream and not be heard, or to be stuck in place and feel himself disappearing once again, inch by inch.

He snaps a pencil in two in the middle of class. Flash makes a stupid joke, and everyone laughs except Ned, and MJ. Peter brushes it off. Flash sucks, what else is new.

The worst part is walking back into the lab the following Wednesday, cold dread settling in the pit of his stomach at the sight of the lab table.

“Change your mind?” Mr. Stark asks at seeing him stalled out in the doorway.

“No.”

This is stupid. It was just a stupid dream; Peter has plenty of very real memories to fear, if he has to be afraid of something. Besides, Mr. Stark’s lab has never been anything but a safe place for him. 

Peter steps inside, dropping his backpack by the door.

“O-okay,” Mr. Stark says, clearly still wondering about Peter’s awkwardness.

“Sorry. I had this weird dream - ”

“About the lab? Kid, you’ve gotta get out more.”

“It wasn’t a good dream.” Peter feels the need to clarify. 

That seems to pull Mr. Stark up short.

“Is this something I should be worried about? Wait, actually - is this something I should expect your aunt to yell at me about?”

“No, I don’t think so.” They haven’t ever talked about Titan, not really. About what happened. “I dreamed I was fading away again,” Peter says. 

There’s no way he can explain any of the rest of it, not without ratting Pete out. 

“Fading, like...?”

“Yeah. Like on Titan. Or, kind of like Titan.”

Mr. Stark flinches at the word, and Peter is instantly glad he didn’t continue with the rest of the thought - that Peter had been fading away because Mr. Stark decided to scrap him and start over with a new model. 

“You dream about that a lot?”

“Um, no. Not a lot. But... sometimes.”

“Me too,” Mr. Stark says. “I usually call them nightmares though.”

“You have nightmares about fading away?”

“I have nightmares about you fading away.” There’s a long pause. Mr. Stark isn’t looking at him. “Strange, wonder where that came from.”

Peter snorts, even though it’s not actually all that funny.

“What do you do, when you have those dreams?” Peter asks.

It’s not a fair question. If Mr. Stark has a nightmare about Peter fading away, he can reach out a hand and feel Pete right there with him in bed. But Peter knows Mr. Stark can’t actually cop to that. It’s a weird feeling, knowing all of that while watching Mr. Stark’s expression flicker through panic and fear and then close down again just as quickly. 

“What I do is try not to sleep,” he says. “This is one of those areas where I’d prefer if you were as little like me as humanly possible.”

“So what am I supposed to do instead?”

Mr. Stark finally looks up at Peter. He keeps rubbing the pads of his fingers over his thumb, around and around.

“The glasses didn’t help, huh?” he asks.

Peter shakes his head. The glasses haven’t helped because he hasn’t used them - not for Titan, at least - but Mr. Stark doesn’t need to know that.

“You know you can call me, right? If you wake up and you’re…” Mr. Stark pauses. “If you need to talk it out.”

No, Peter doesn’t know. Mr. Stark has never made that offer before.

He tries to picture it - actually calling Mr. Stark up in the middle of the night, rather than just toying with the idea. How would that conversation even go? _Sorry to interrupt your super important meeting about the fate of the galaxy, Mr. Stark, but I had a bad dream and I need you to tell me I’m not fading to dust._

Or, worse: _Sorry to interrupt you and Pete, but I keep having this recurring nightmare where you replace me. Wonder where that came from._

So, no. Not happening. 

“Thanks,” Peter says, and tries his best to mean it.  
  



	7. Chapter 7

The first time Pete sucks him off, Peter leaves two fist-sized notches in the concrete underneath him - one under each hand, and it takes a while before his brain unscrambles enough that he can talk.

“Woah.”

Pete laughs, wiping the back of his hand across his face and flopping back down.

“Good?”

“Yeah. So good.”

Pete’s chin is digging into Peter’s upper thigh, his hands curled around the waistband of Peter’s jeans and boxers, which are pushed down just past his hips. He glances down and can’t help squirming when he notices Pete looking at his dick. 

Jarred by the movement, Pete looks up at him and then shrugs.

“What? I’ve never seen it this up close before.”

“Mine, or yours?”

“Either.” Peter licks his lips. “Think you can go again?”

“Uh, yeah.”

Pete takes it slower the second time around, and all Peter can do is watch, transfixed at the sight of his dick disappearing into Pete’s mouth as he bobs his head. Peter digs his hands into Pete’s hair, careful not to pull - or careful not to pull hard, at least. 

Pete closes his eyes and moans at the touch, which sends something like sparks tripping up and down what feels like every nerve ending in Peter’s body. Peter lets his head thunk back against the wall behind him. 

“Fuck.”

He comes pretty soon after that - an apology on his lips for not giving Pete more warning, although Pete’s arms are locked around his hips so he couldn’t pull away even if he wanted to. When Peter is fully wrung out, Pete rolls off to the side, his head resting against Peter’s outer thigh. 

Now that Pete is stretched out on his back, Peter can’t help but notice the bulge in his jeans. 

“Hey, can I… ?” Peter says.

Pete tips his head back to look up at him. “Yeah, definitely.”

They rearrange themselves - Peter kneeling between Pete’s bent knees, his hands a little unsteady as he unzips Pete’s fly. He’s done this before, or he sort of has. Once. In a memory. It doesn’t really feel like that counts, now that Peter is looking at doing it for real.

“Does - ” Peter stops. 

No, he’s not going to ask. 

“I don’t actually get to do it all that often,” Peter says, answering the unasked question anyway. “Sucking him off, I mean. He kinda prefers the other way around, so I guess no pressure there, ‘cause it’s not like I’m all that great at it.”

Peter would very much beg to differ, based on his limited experience. Then again, his limited experience is basically nothing, not when it’s compared to like, decades worth of sleeping around with Maxim models and Fortune 500 CEOs and (almost literally) everyone in between. It sends Peter’s head spinning, when he thinks about it. That somehow after all of that, the person Mr. Stark chooses to climb into bed with each night is ...him. Or, sort of him.

Pete is right about one thing - it’s weirdly fascinating to see his own dick at this angle, this close. Peter takes an experimental lick, thrilled when he can feel and hear Pete’s barely suppressed gasp in response. 

It tastes kind of funny, but not in a bad way. Peter pulls his lips over his teeth and sucks the head into his mouth the way Pete showed him. He’s not able to get much more in without gagging, but Pete doesn’t seem to be complaining - he has one hand buried in Peter’s hair and the other fist shoved against his mouth, trying to keep somewhat quiet.

Peter uses his hand to help things along, trying not to feel too self conscious about the drool dripping down his chin or how totally uncoordinated he feels, nothing like the smoothly orchestrated rhythm Mr. Stark manages to nail between his tongue and lips and throat and hands. 

Pete’s orgasm takes him by surprise, and Peter gags on the first splash of come filling his mouth, jerking back and coughing, resigned to finishing Pete off with just his hand.

“Sorry,” he mutters, after both of them have caught their breath, wiping his chin off with a crumpled tissue.

“Don’t be. Practice makes perfect, right? Guess you’ll just need a lot more practice,” Pete says, waggling his eyebrows.

Peter throws the crumpled up tissue at his face, laughing.

*

When Peter wakes up the next morning, May is already in the shower, humming along to the radio. 

He grabs a fresh t-shirt out of his dresser and a pair of jeans off the floor to get dressed, heading out into the kitchen where there’s a pot of coffee already brewing. He shoves a couple of pop-tarts in the toaster and scrolls through twitter as he waits for them to be done. 

Nothing too exciting last night. Someone caught a couple of really awesome pics of Pete crouched on a rooftop ledge, the yellow accents of his suit standing out against the blue-ish haze of the city skyline. But no reports of crazy crimes or aliens or anything showing up an wreaking havoc after Peter had called it quits last night, for which he’s grateful.

The toaster dings and Peter grabs the pop-tarts out of it, eating them off of a paper towel on the kitchen counter.

May emerges from the bathroom not long after that, breezing by to give Peter a quick hug from behind, pressing a kiss to the top of his head and then reaching around him to grab her coffee.

“Running a little late today, sorry,” she says. “You got breakfast, and lunch money?”

“Yeah, I got it. See you later?”

“I’ll be home around 7, unless this fundraiser thing runs late. God, I hope it doesn’t run late.”

“‘Kay.”

“Text me, if you’re gonna be out Spider-Manning?”

“I will.” 

That was the compromise they’d worked out well over a year (or three years) ago now - Peter could go out on patrol, but he had to text May when he left, what neighborhood he was in, and when he came back in. No exceptions. And even though that’s been the case for months now, May reminds him every morning, and Peter promises her he will.

“Okay, see you later. Love you!” she calls over her shoulder, grabbing her keys off the hook by the door.

“Love you, May,” Peter calls back, mouth half-full of pop-tart.

Peter finishes his breakfast, washes his face and brushes his teeth, and heads out. He takes the train to school, sits through classes, eats lunch with Ned and MJ. The Decathlon team is meeting after school that afternoon, but Peter doesn’t go. Instead, he heads out on patrol, texting May first just like promised.

“You don’t like doing Decathlon anymore?” Pete asks as they pull out of the memory.

They’re both sitting cross-legged on Peter’s bed, facing one another. May will be out for another couple hours, so they’ve got the apartment to themselves, for the moment.

Peter shrugs. “I like it okay. I don’t know, it kinda seems like a waste of time, you know?”

“If you like it, it isn’t a waste of time.”

“Yeah, but me knowing the atomic number of vibranium isn’t gonna mean much if aliens show up again.”

Pete looks like he wants to argue, but he doesn’t say anything.

“Swap?” Peter asks, holding out the primary set of glasses. He doesn’t want to talk about the Decathlon team, or what might or might not happen tomorrow or a month or a year from now.

“Okay.” 

Pete takes the primary set and hands over the secondaries, tapping the fingers of his other hand against his thigh, thinking. 

“Typical-ish morning, right?” he asks.

“Right.”

This time when Peter wakes up, the bed is a whole lot bigger, but he’s just as alone. He stretches out, yawning, and pads over to the bathroom. It only takes a couple minutes to wash his hands and face. He grabs a pair of boxers and a t-shirt from the dresser and pulls them on before heading out into the kitchen.

Tony is already dressed, but just in jeans and long sleeve shirt. So, probably spending some time in the lab then, Pete thinks, grinning to himself. Tony has a bunch of papers spread out over the kitchen island, along with his tablet and some kind of projection going, scrolling through code, error messages flashing red off to one side of the display.

Pete walks over to his side, eyes focused mostly on the display, trying to parse out what he’s looking at. Tony doesn’t seem to notice him until he’s right there, finally tearing his attention away from his work to wrap an arm around Pete’s side.

“Can I help?” Pete asks, stifling another yawn.

“Mmm, maybe if you wake up a little bit.”

Pete reaches out, taking Tony’s coffee to steal a sip and then pulling a face. _Yuegh_ , it’s cold. Tony must’ve already been at it for a while now already.

“That stuff’s gonna stunt your growth.”

“Too late,” Pete says, rolling his eyes. “You could’ve made me taller, you know.”

“Would’ve changed your center of gravity, had an impact on your little Tarzan routine.”

“You thought about it, though?”

“No.”

Pete hesitates. “Why not? You could’ve changed, like, anything you wanted to.”

Tony turns away from his screen, regarding Pete with a stony expression, his hand tightening around Pete’s hip. 

“Kid, this wasn’t a better-stronger-faster kind of deal. You know what I was trying to do.”

Pete looks away, nodding jerkily.

Tony takes the opportunity to lean in, planting an open-mouthed kiss to the side of Pete’s neck, then working his way down to the join of Peter’s neck and shoulder, pushing the neck of Pete’s t-shirt aside for better access.

Pete lets himself go lax, leaning into the touch, allowing Tony to move and turn him as he wants. 

He ends up standing between Tony’s spread thighs, his back to Tony’s front, Tony’s hands working their way up under his t-shirt to wander over his belly and chest, one hand dipping down underneath the waistband of his boxers, fingertips teasing at the sensitive skin right at the base of Peter’s cock.

“Thought you were working,” Pete says, although it’s far from an objection.

“I can multitask.”

“I can’t. Too early.”

Tony chuckles. “You don’t have to.”

Ten minutes later Peter’s boxers are sticky and gross with cooling spunk and Tony is wiping his hand off on the front of Peter’s t-shirt, using his other hand to take a sip of his cold coffee. Peter’s nose wrinkles.

“These clothes were clean, you know.”

“As if you don’t have any others. FRIDAY, does Pete have clean clothes? Any at all?”

“Don’t answer that FRIDAY, Tony’s just being a jerk,” Pete says, heaving a put-upon sigh and worming his way out from Tony’s grasp. 

“I’m gonna shower,” he says, pausing for a moment to see if Tony might take the hint. But Tony is already buried back in his work, waving him off distractedly. 

“Come down to the lab when you’re done,” Tony says. “Got something else I want a second set of eyes on.”

“‘kay.”

Pete showers alone, then gets dressed, grabs some breakfast for himself and heads downstairs. 

Lab time is eerily similar to what Peter is used to already - enough so that it almost breaks him out of the memory, thrown off-kilter by the change in dynamic from one floor of the building to the next.

“Um - ” he starts, not sure how to ask.

“There’s a pretty strict no sex, no touching in the lab rule,” Pete explains. “It’s like the only lab safety rule he actually enforces.”

“Because of me,” Peter says. It’s not a question. “Because he doesn’t want to slip up.”

“Yeah, probably. He gets pretty uptight about boundaries and stuff, with you.”

_Because he doesn’t want to touch me the way he touches you. Even by accident_ , Peter thinks. He pulls off the glasses. 

“Maybe we shouldn’t do this. Mr. Stark doesn’t want - ” _me_ , Peter leaves unsaid, although it must come through loud and clear anyway. 

Pete pulls off his glasses as well, both eyebrows raised, looking slightly irritated. 

“Oh my god, for people that are supposed to be pretty smart, the two of you are like a critical mass of stupid. And yeah, I realize I’m basically like, insulting myself by proxy saying that, it doesn’t make it any less true.”

“Huh?”

“Did you miss the part where we look exactly the same? Tony had the technology to literally print life, he could’ve made _anything_ he could imagine or design, and he’s got a pretty big brain, he can imagine a heck of a lot of stuff. And he printed you. Or I mean me, as a copy of you. And then he had sex with me. This is like, junior-high level math, dude. If statement A containing value X is true, and values X and Y are equal - ”

“This isn’t some logic puzzle,” Peter fires back. For the first time, he honestly wonders if Pete’s brain might really operate that much different from his own. “If we were really the same, then Tony would treat us the same, and he doesn’t, okay? He doesn’t look at me the same way he looks at you, he doesn’t touch me the same way he does when it’s you, he doesn’t trust me the same way he trusts you, otherwise he would’ve told me you existed rather than trying to hide everything like he’s doing.”

Peter immediately regrets the outburst. 

It isn’t Pete’s fault that somehow, someway, Peter doesn’t measure up. But at the same time, he’s almost glad it’s all out there now. Maybe they can both stop tip toeing around it like they have been up until now.

Peter is quiet for a long moment, and so is Pete; neither one knowing where to start.

“Listen, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have - ”

“He wanted you to have everything,” Pete says, interrupting. “When you came back. As soon as he realized it might actually be possible, he wanted you to have the life you should’ve had. And that didn’t include having a weird copy of yourself hanging around, or a mentor that wanted stuff from you that he probably shouldn’t. So yeah, he treats you differently. It doesn’t mean he cares any less.”

Peter can remember in minute detail the expression on Mr. Stark’s face there at the end, on Titan. Fear, and anguish, and a desperate attempt to sound calm as he tried to convince both Peter and himself that everything was going to be okay. How angry he’d been at Peter for sneaking back onto the ship, before that. 

Peter knows Mr. Stark cares about him. He just wishes - he doesn’t even know what.

Or maybe he does. He wishes he could hear the things Pete is saying from the man himself, rather than working off of assumptions and second-hand assurances.

But something else bugs him too, about the way Pete had phrased things. 

“If he shouldn’t want that kind of thing with me, then he shouldn’t want it from you, either,” Peter says.

Pete shrugs. “Kinda too late for that. We started before anyone had any idea the Snap could be undone, and even after... I guess you’re right, maybe we were made to be the same but we’re not. Not in practice, not really, and we won’t ever be. ‘Cause you already had a place in the world, undoing the Snap just put you back where you already belonged. I’m the one that doesn’t fit.”

Peter bites his lip, trying to imagine it once again; waking up one day knowing that another version of yourself was coming back into the world, one that would pick up the life that could’ve, would’ve been yours.

_He wanted you to have everything_ , Pete had said. _The life you should’ve had._

And by necessity, that’s the very same life that Pete himself doesn’t get to have.

“You fit with him,” Peter says. “And with me - he’s wrong about that. Maybe he does want all this stuff for me, but he doesn’t get to decide who I should or shouldn’t have in my life. And I don’t care if he made you or not, he shouldn’t get to decide that for you either.”

Pete looks away, then spins around and leans back, his weight settling against Peter’s side.

“It’s easy for you to say stuff like that,” Pete says, craning his neck over just enough to look back at Peter.

“Yeah, and I’ll keep saying it, if you want me to.”

*

For all of Peter’s doubts, neither one of them suggests that they stop their so-called practicing. 

Peter doesn’t even really think of it as practice anymore, if he’s honest. It’s just… something they do together. They spend hours kissing, tucked into hidden nooks on rooftops or abandoned buildings, plus any time they can get the apartment or the penthouse to themselves to do more. 

Sometimes the ‘more’ is just sparring, or testing out new web fluid formulas, if the penthouse is available. 

But more often than not, ‘more’ means a test of both of their combined endurance and control. They spend one frantic afternoon patching Peter’s bed frame back together with wood glue and nails, and another evening coming up with increasingly ridiculous stories Pete could use to explain why one of Mr. Stark’s dumbbell bars is inexplicably snapped in half.

“I say we just hide it and plead the fifth if he notices,” Peter suggests.

“Easy for you to say, you won’t be the one getting asked about it.”

True.

“So… maybe no more sex stuff in the gym from now on?”

“Maybe next time you’re that close to coming you could just give in rather than snapping whatever happens to be in your hands like it’s a twig.”

Neither one of them bring up their earlier conversation, although it seems to loom like a cloud over everything Peter does for the next week. 

He gets now that Pete must have picked that specific morning to show him for a reason; because he wanted Peter to hear for himself that Mr. Stark wanted Pete to be an exact replica, or at least as close as he could get. 

Knowing that doesn’t make it any easier though, because whether Mr. Stark meant for them to be different or not, it doesn’t change how he looks (or doesn’t look) at Peter now.

*

“Okay, am I getting the silent treatment for a reason or have you been replaced by a pod person?” Mr. Stark asks him at lab that week.

“Huh?”

“Earth to Peter. Did I forget a birthday or an anniversary or something, or are you that spaced out that I should be sending you home?”

Peter purses his lips, not sure how to respond to the suggestion that he and Mr. Stark would have anything like an anniversary to celebrate. That was definitely a ‘couple’ sort of thing, as far as Peter knew.

“I’m fine,” he says instead.

“Right.” Mr. Stark takes a deep breath, then lets it out slowly without looking up. “Nightmares?”

Peter nods, because it’s the easiest thing to do, and almost even the truth. He belatedly realizes that Mr. Stark can’t see him nodding. “Yeah, sometimes.”

“Titan?”

“Sometimes.”

That causes Mr. Stark to look up at him, finally. “What else?”

“Sometimes I dream that I didn’t get to come back like everyone else. Like I’m here but no one notices that I’m here, but they don’t notice that I’m gone either.”

It’s the least incriminating nightmare Peter can think of to share, and even so Mr. Stark looks like Peter walked across the room and smacked him in the face with an Iron Man gauntlet.

“Kid - ”

“It’s okay. I know it’s not real, it’s just my brain trying to process coming back. And I know that I’m back, that this is real. I know that people would notice if I was gone,” Peter says in a rush, desperately trying to paper back over the damage. Dammit, he should’ve just kept his mouth shut. This isn’t Mr. Stark’s problem.

But Mr. Stark is shaking his head.

“You know that I was done, right, after I made it back? Checked out, off the team,” he says. “I didn’t put the suit on for two years. Longest I’ve gone without since I put the first one on in Afghanistan.”

Peter does know - not specifically the stuff about the suit, but he knew that Mr. Stark had come back from Titan in pretty rough shape. That it had taken him a long time to recover. He hadn’t quite realized that Mr. Stark had considered his retirement a permanent thing, at the time.

“Then Cap shows up at my door with this whole crazy plan, and Natasha - ” he trails off, blinking. “I told them to fuck off. Politely - well, sort of, but that was the gist of it. You were the reason I changed my mind.”

Months and months ago, Pete had sort of implied something similar. Peter had forced himself to ignore it then, assuming he must’ve misunderstood; that it must have been wishful thinking on his part.

“I - it wasn’t just about me,” Peter says.

“No, it wasn’t,” Mr. Stark agrees. “And I’d like to think I would’ve had enough of a moral center to do it anyway, but if I didn’t think I could bring you back along with everyone else, I honestly can’t say for sure I would’ve tried - but that’s not the point. What I’m trying to say is you can bet your ass I would’ve noticed if you hadn’t come back, kid.”

Peter ducks his head. It feels just a little bit like it used to, back at the very beginning when he got a thrill every time he remembered that Mr. Stark actually knew his name.

“Thanks, sir.”

“You don’t have to thank me. Just - try to remember that, next time you go to sleep.”

*

Peter does. Of course he does, because Mr. Stark asked him to.

He’s not sure it actually does anything to help, necessarily, but he does fall asleep thinking about all the things Mr. Stark had said. He doesn’t share Mr. Stark’s doubts - yeah, maybe Mr. Stark needed some time to recover after Titan, but of course he was going to get back out there and try to bring everyone back, regardless of what happened to Peter.

But it is sort of nice, in a sort of weird way, to think that Mr. Stark literally invented a way to travel back in time just to save Peter. Or that if for some reason Peter hadn’t made it back with everyone else, that Mr. Stark would’ve just kept trying.

The thought scares him a little too. 

How many branching realities might the Avengers have created and then doomed if their plan hadn’t worked out? Or what if, in those final moments of the battle, Mr. Stark had been just a little bit closer to infinity gauntlet than Nebula had been?

He has strange dreams that night, morphing from one incomprehensible setting to the next. The city is a snowglobe, shaking furiously as Peter tries to swing back to the tower for help. Doctor Strange is there on the battlefield, one finger pointing up towards the sky and looking… surprised? Then Pete is there with him on Titan, standing shoulder to shoulder with Peter as they heave with everything they’ve got to get the glove off in time. Maybe this time - 

But no.

Peter feels it coming, just like he always does. Like his sixth sense goes haywire - usually he can pick up a direction or at least let his instincts tell him which way to go, but this time the entire world around him is screaming _THREAT_ \- 

Peter stumbles, starts to fall; but Mr. Stark isn’t there this time. 

Peter hits the ground.

He wakes up gasping, heart racing, lungs screaming for air. Before he can think too hard about it he’s grabbed his phone out from under his pillow, fingers hovering over the screen. He hits call.

He almost hangs up four times in the seconds it takes for the phone to start ringing on the other end. But then Mr. Stark’s voice come through, rough with sleep. 

“Kid? What’s going on?” 

Peter’s mouth falls open, still too focused on getting air in his lungs to formulate a reply.

“Peter, talk to me. Are you okay?” 

“ _He’s not_ ,” Peter hears Pete say, anxiously, his voice pitched almost too low and soft for Peter to catch. It takes a moment for Peter’s panicking brain to realize that while he and Peter can hear each other just fine, Mr. Stark probably doesn’t realize that. 

There’s some muffled sounds on the other end, like Mr. Stark is shifting around on the bed. Then, “You’re not in your suit, I can’t see your vitals. Can you tell me where you are?”

“Home. I’m home,” Peter manages. He hears Mr. Stark sigh in relief.

“Okay, good. Is May there?”

Peter closes his eyes, leaning back against the pillows. He clears his throat. “Yeah, she’s here. But I can’t… I don’t want to wake her up with this. I’m sorry, I’m sorry I didn’t mean to wake you up, I just - ”

“Hey hey hey, it’s alright. Try to take a deep breath.”

Peter does. He’s calm enough now to feel like an idiot. Worse, he feels like he’s about to burst into tears.

“Do you… Peter, I need you to tell me what you need right now.”

Peter takes a few more deep breaths, trying to figure out how to answer. What exactly had he been expecting, when he’d hit call? He honestly has no idea. The only thought in his head had been a desperate need to recapture that brief, bright feeling he’d had in the lab a few days ago, when Mr. Stark had talked about bringing him back.

“Tell me again, that thing you said in the lab.”

“What - oh,” Mr. Stark says. “So, you know there’s an extremely limited number of people I’m willing to take calls from at 3AM, right? I’m talking like, the secretary of state can leave a message, here.”

Peter snorts despite himself. He’s not really sure where this is going, but he is pretty sure Mr. Stark isn’t about to reprimand him for calling or anything like that. He’s proven right a moment later when Mr. Stark continues talking - 

“Seriously. If he’d been snapped instead of you, time travel would still be considered science fiction.”

It’s kind of morbid, but it works. Peter can finally feel his panic really starting to subside.

“Time travel still is considered science fiction for most people, Mr. Stark, unless you were planning on going public with the whole story,” Peter replies, after a minute. 

He can hear Pete laughing almost silently in the background and almost manages a grin himself, not that anyone is there to see it. “Yeah, that’d be a no,” Mr. Stark says. “So, you want to tell me what had you so freaked out?”

Peter sucks in a breath. “Can that also be a no?”

“Probably not.”

“Just, you know. Titan. Again.”

“Ah.”

“Yeah.”

“ _What about Titan?_ ” he hears Pete quietly prompt in the background. But Mr. Stark doesn’t ask, so Peter doesn’t answer.

“I really am sorry for waking you up, sir.”

Peter isn’t five anymore; crawling into May and Ben’s bed every night because he was scared that the same nameless, faceless monster that took his parents was coming back for him. In the wake of this new nightmare, all Peter can feel is shame.

He hears Mr. Stark swear under his breath, probably assuming it was quiet enough not to carry over the line.

“Don’t apologize. I meant what I said before. You can always call, kid, okay?”

“Yeah.”

“Think you can get back to sleep?”

Peter mumbles something in the affirmative, well past ready to get off the phone, wishing he hadn’t called. He feels like an idiot. Yeah, it’d been nice to hear Mr. Stark’s voice, strong and steady, bringing him back down to earth, but all that is cancelled out by how pathetic he feels, calling up Iron Man in the middle of the night because he had a bad dream.

_Some superhero_ , Peter thinks.

Mr. Stark says good night, and Peter hangs up. He presses the heels of his hands against his eyes, then drags his hands down his face. 

Regardless of what he said to Mr. Stark just a minute ago, he knows he’s not going to be able to get to sleep. May will be pissed if he goes out patrolling this late at night. So will Mr. Stark, for that matter.

Peter rolls over in bed, pulling his pillow over the back of his head to hide underneath it. Mr. Stark is supposed to be away again for a few days. If Peter can make it through tonight and then school tomorrow, then he and Pete have the whole weekend to hang out. Peter tries to focus on that instead.

Besides, he and Pete have plans.

*

“Are you tired?” is the first thing Pete asks when he sees him the next afternoon.

Peter bristles. “It was one bad dream. I’m not like an invalid, dude.”

“Woah okay. Sorry for asking.”

“Sorry. Yeah, I’m tired, but I’ve been way worse. It’s fine.”

“Okay.” Pete hesitates, eyeing Peter. “You know neither one of us judges you for calling, right? He has nightmares too, so do I - just, not about the same things as you, probably.”

Peter nods. Neither one of them freaks out and calls Peter in the middle of the night, but whatever. Peter doesn’t want this weekend to be about all that stuff. He shifts on his feet, trying to figure out how to ask.

Pete grins back at him, probably noticing his impatience.

“I’ve got the stuff we need upstairs. Did you bring the glasses?”

Wait. “The glasses?”

“Yeah. For the memory, right?”

“Uh, the memory?” Peter asks, even more confused.

“I thought - uh. I thought we were gonna use them, to... you know.”

Peter shakes his head. He hadn’t really thought about that, actually, although he can definitely see where Pete would have assumed that’s what he meant.

“Oh,” Pete says.

“I mean, if that’s okay? I’d rather it just be about us, you know, for a first time, instead of making it about someone who isn’t even here.”

Pete doesn’t move, but a strange look comes over his face. 

“Yeah. I get that,” he says slowly.

“So like, maybe one of the guest bedrooms instead of going upstairs?”

Pete nods. “Sure, we might as well. You pick a room and I’ll grab the lube.”

The matter of fact way Pete mentions lube makes Peter’s face flush with heat, although thankfully Pete is already heading upstairs and doesn’t notice. Peter ends up picking the bedroom Pete had shown him the first day they’d met, which Pete definitely notices when he comes back.

“Seemed appropriate,” Peter says with a shrug.

“Yep.”

Pete kicks the door closed behind himself as he comes in, tossing the lube on the bed next to Peter before climbing into Peter’s lap and kissing him.

Peter lets himself tip backwards to lay flat on the bed, Pete following him down.

Pete backs off after a few minutes though, tipping his chin away and laughing when Peter tries to follow his mouth. “Dude, focus. You or me?”

Peter blinks. “Okay, I know I’m new at this but I kinda assumed it was gonna involve the both of us.” 

Pete doesn’t look amused.

“You know, someday I’m gonna sleep with someone who isn’t a smartass, and I’m not gonna have any idea how to handle it.”

“I have some bad news for you about being my clone, dude, there’s literally always going to be a smartass involved as long as you’re there.”

Peter flips them over, preempting any response from Pete with another series of kisses.

“Okay, but seriously - ” Pete says between breaths. “Did you want to fuck me, or do you want to be the one getting fucked?”

The question sends a jolt of excitement though Peter’s belly, straight to his dick.

“Both?” he offers.

“Yeah, duh, but which one first? I don’t think we’re flexible enough to make both at the same time work, like, anatomically.”

They both pause for a moment to consider it, but end up dismissing the idea pretty quickly.

“I dunno. What’s better?” Peter asks.

“Uh, I haven’t actually been on the other side of things.”

It doesn’t come as much of a surprise to Peter - he figures if Pete had, it would’ve come up in a memory at some point, or at least in conversation. The idea sends a thrill through him though; that this can be a first for both of them.

“Okay so fuck me then, and let me know how it compares.”

Pete seems to be very much on board with that plan, if the speed at which he strips down or the glistening bead of precum on the tip of his cock is any indication. Peter strips down just as fast, dumping his clothes over the side of the bed without caring.

It’s almost weird to be fully naked in front of someone else without feeling the least bit awkward or self-conscious. Peter leans back on his elbows, bending his knees and letting his legs fall open. If it were anyone other than Pete with him right now, he’d be embarrassed at his own eagerness. As it is though, Peter just looks delighted at the implicit permission, and Peter can’t help but smile in response.

Pete grabs the lube from the bottom of the bed. 

“Does it hurt?” Peter asks. Not that he’s worried, exactly, but he’s definitely curious - Pete’s shared more than a few memories of Mr. Stark fucking him, but none of them had been the first time, Peter is pretty sure. Maybe the first time is different. Everyone seems to think it is, at least.

“It won’t hurt,” Pete says. “We’re not as big as Tony, and he’s never hurt me, not even when we didn’t really do much prep. It will feel weird though. Have you tried - you know?” Pete wiggles a couple of fingers in the air.

“Yeah. But only a couple.”

“That’s okay, then you have an idea how it feels already. It’ll be the same thing, just more. Try to relax.”

Peter does his best to follow Pete’s advice, although he reflexively tenses up as Pete pushes a finger inside. Peter licks his lips and concentrates on relaxing. Pete must be able to feel the difference, because he looks up with a quirk of his lips.

“Nice.”

Pete is right; it does feel weird. He’s able to get his fingers a little deeper than Peter’s been able to on his own, thanks to a much better angle, and he’s a lot less tentative than Peter had been fingering himself. Peter figures this is one time where having the same bodies must be pretty advantageous, especially when Pete manages to hit a spot inside Peter at just the right angle to set every nerve ending in his body sparking with pleasure. 

It’s so much better than the memories, Peter thinks, gasping and blinking up at the ceiling.

He doesn’t actually track Pete adding more fingers, only vaguely aware that the stretch-y uncomfortable feeling comes back and then dissipates almost immediately.

“Pete, I’m gonna - is it okay if I - ?” Pete says.

“Yeah, yeah do it.” Peter nods eagerly, inexplicably thrilled by Pete’s slip of the tongue.

Pete is braced over him with one hand on the mattress beside Peter’s head, and intense look of concentration on his face as he lines up. Peter’s mouth falls open at the first hint of pressure against his hole, but Pete ducks down, sucking Peter’s lower lip into his mouth and then letting it go, muttering “ _relax, relax_ ” against his lips.

Peter does. His eyes slip closed as Pete presses the rest of the way in, and he reaches up to loop his arms around Pete’s back, urging him on.

Pete starts to move inside him; chest to chest, cheek to cheek, Peter can feel every breath punched out of Pete’s lungs against his skin and he knows, without a doubt, that Pete can feel the exact same thing against his own.

Pete’s thrusts speed up, growing almost frantic for a minute and then slow to nearly a stop, Pete shuddering above him.

“Did you just - ?”

“Mmhm. Gimme a minute. I can - ”

Pete’s pace picks up again, and Peter thinks he actually might cry with how good it feels. It’s a little bit messier than before, Pete’s come mixing with the lube and the speed of Pete’s thrusts to make some truly filthy sounds that Peter has only previously heard in pay-per-view porn.

Peter comes before he even realizes he’s close, Pete huffing out a laugh above him - pure joy at Peter’s pleasure.

At some point they flip over, Peter straddled over Pete’s lap, riding him. 

At some point Peter loses track of who’s come when and how many times. He loves every minute of it.

Peter is first to tap out; one hand splayed across Pete’s chest, heart pounding against his fingertips, his own and Pete’s, murmuring, “I can’t, I can’t - I gotta stop. It’s too - ”

Pete pulls out, collapsing back to the bed next to Peter as if he were a puppet with his strings cut.

They lay there catching their breath, chests rising and falling in tandem. Pete’s hand is resting, palm up, on Peter’s chest - Peter gathers up the energy to move his own hand enough to grab at it.

He turns his head towards Pete.

“We should definitely do that again,” he says.

“Now?” Pete asks, eyes widening in disbelief.

“Not _now_ now. Just, again. Sometime. In like, five minutes.”

Pete’s eyes have slipped closed, but he’s laughing. “‘Mkay yeah. Five minutes.”

Peter falls asleep just like that; sticky with sweat and exhausted, and so unexpectedly content that his face actually sort of aches from grinning.  
  



	8. Chapter 8

They end up eating their way through two boxes of pizza rolls for dinner, sprawled out on the couch and passing a two-liter bottle of soda back and forth between them. Peter watches as Pete sucks melted cheese and marinara off of his thumb. 

“You know Tony’s never had a pizza roll?” Pete says, looking up.

“Seriously?”

“Pretty sure. He looked at me like I was eating deep-fried crickets or something the first time I asked FRIDAY to add them to the list.”

“That’s weird.”

“Right?”

Peter tips his head to the side. “Wait. How did you remember what they tasted like?”

“I didn’t, at first. I uh, I found them in your freezer at the old apartment.”

“So you pilfered our food?” Peter asks, half-grinning.

“I mean, it’s not like either of you were around to eat it,” Pete says, and Peter snorts. 

It feels kind of weird to laugh about being dusted, even tangentially, but also... kind of good too. His panic from the night before has mostly faded, replaced by a bubbling sort of joy and a determination to appreciate the present moment as much as is humanly or inhumanly possible.

Peter stretches out his legs, sneaking his toes underneath Pete’s thigh. 

He’s not really sure how he’s supposed to feel, with the way some people make a big deal about sex; but he doesn’t feel any different from before, really. Mostly he just wants to do it again.

“We could order real food though too, if you want.” Pete offers, seemingly oblivious.

“Nah, I’m good for now.”

Peter calls Ned, because he promised he would. Not because of the sex thing - Ned doesn’t need to know about that and Peter has zero intentions of telling him, but Ned does know about the sleepover-at-Tony-Stark’s-penthouse thing, so doing a video chat had been pretty much non-negotiable. 

They give Ned a tour of the main living areas, switching off videographer and narration duties. Peter is pretty sure that Pete is making up the names of some of the types of wood and designers and stuff, but doesn’t call him out on it. 

They could be real. Maybe.

“What does his kitchen smell like?” Ned asks, and Peter catches a flash of his own baffled expression mirrored on Pete’s face.

“Um,” Pete says. “Right now like pizza rolls, mostly? Usually it smells like coffee. Tony doesn’t really do the cooking thing.”

“Oooh.” Ned nods somberly, like he’s been bestowed with some sort of secret wisdom.

Peter takes a moment to zoom in on the espresso machine, all the shining buttons and knobs. 

It’s way more intense than the drip one that Peter’s used to using down in the lab. Maybe Pete can show him how to use it tomorrow morning, and they can have fancy coffee with whatever breakfast-like food gets delivered. 

Peter doesn’t even like coffee all that much, but maybe fancy penthouse coffee would be different. 

“There’s a french press up there,” Pete is saying, gesturing up to one of the cabinets as Peter refocuses the camera on him. “And one of those pour over things too, I think? I don’t know, stuff just kind of shows up here sometimes and I’m not even sure if Tony knows it’s here or not.”

“Like me,” Peter says.

Pete snorts. “Yeah, like you.”

They all spend a while geeking out over the media room. Peter still finds it a little hard to believe that Mr. Stark owns a Switch and a PS5, along with a pretty solid collection of games. He can’t exactly picture Mr. Stark lounging around playing Fortnite.

“He doesn’t play, dude,” Pete says, seeming to read Peter’s mind. “I think he literally just has FRIDAY order things she thinks a teenager would want to have around. Like I said, stuff just kind of shows up here.”

“What if you told FRIDAY you wanted a car? Or a motorcycle?” Ned prompts.

Pete shrugs, frowning like it’s not something he’s thought about before. 

“She’d probably do it? But I think at some point someone would have to sign paperwork for insurance and stuff.”

“Dude, you’ve gotta tell him that you know about each other,” Ned says in a rush. “I know it’s weird and maybe scary ‘cause you might be pissing off Iron Man, but you’ve gotta do it. Mostly for me, because if you tell him that you already know then it’s not a secret anymore and you guys can hang out together whenever you want, and then I can come over there and hang out too!”

Pete freezes. Probably not enough to be noticeable over the video stream, but enough that Peter doesn’t miss it. He flips the camera back to himself. 

“Sorry, man. I’m not even supposed to be here, you know? We’re kinda already tempting Iron Man’s wrath a lot for one night.”

Ned sighs. “Yeah, I get it. If anything really cool happens though, you _have_ to call me.”

Peter assures Ned that he will and ends the call. Pete’s mouth is quirked downwards in a slight frown. 

“What exactly does he think is gonna happen?”

“No idea. It’s the penthouse at Avengers tower - evil robots could attack, or a portal to space could open up in the sky right above us, or uh - ”

“That’s only like two times that crazy things have happened here, and they were both before I even exited. Every other night has been just been like, a regular boring night.”

Sure. A regular boring night sleeping in Mr. Stark’s bed.

“Hey, want to have sex in the shower?” Pete says, interrupting his thoughts.

The answer is yes. 

It’s pretty awesome; Pete’s hands splayed out on the tiles behind his head, his ankles hooked over one another behind Peter’s back as Peter supports both their weights. 

He doesn’t manage to last very long, but it doesn’t seem to matter all that much since neither does Pete.

*

Peter wakes up the next morning to a hand clamped over his mouth, and Pete looking down at him with wide eyes. Peter blinks a few times, uncomprehendingly; they’d stayed up pretty late last night after the shower. 

He’s actually not even sure what time it is, but it only takes a few seconds to zero in on what has Pete in a state of high alert: the low murmur of a voice coming from somewhere down the hall. 

Mr. Stark’s voice, talking to FRIDAY by the sound of it.

Pete must be able to tell the moment realization sinks in, because he pulls his hand away from Peter’s mouth.

“I thought he was gone all weekend,” Peter mouths, barely more than a whisper.

“Guess not.”

Pete rolls off the bed, grabbing his boxers and t-shirt off the floor and getting dressed in near silence. Peter sits up, watching.

“What do I do?” he whispers when Pete looks up again.

Pete glances back towards the door, biting his lip. “I’ll go out and distract him. Just like, stay here for a bit, okay? FRIDAY doesn’t monitor the guest rooms except for like, security and fire alarms and stuff.” 

With one last look back at Peter and a quick nod Pete slips out the door, closing it behind him.

Peter stays in bed, frozen in place for a moment as he listens to Pete’s footsteps heading down the hall. It’s quiet for a bit, then he can hear a murmur of conversation from what Peter has to guess is somewhere near the kitchen. 

He doesn’t mean to listen in, but with the last tendrils of sleep clearing from his head, his senses seem to stretch out of their own accord; wide awake now. 

He wishes they weren’t when he hears the unmistakable sound of a kiss, followed by a sigh. 

Peter’s hands fist in the sheets. He shakes his head, this is creepy. Not that he can entirely help it, but he shouldn’t be listening, especially when he hears a groan he very much recognizes thanks to last night.

“You just wake up?” he hears Tony murmur.

Peter licks his lips, mouths the word _yeah_ just as hears Pete say it out loud.

Tony snorts. “I can tell. You’ve got a pretty impressive case of bedhead going there, kid.”

Peter runs a hand through his own hair. It’s probably even messier than Pete’s, since it’s still a bit longer.

“Missed you,” Pete says.

“Weren’t you threatening to throw a rager the second I left?”

“No, you were the one trying to imply that I should. Who would I even invite over for that?”

“I don’t know. The youth at large.”

Pete laughs. “Right, sure.”

“I’m just saying, the place looks surprisingly undestroyed for the morning after. I’m a little disappointed.”

“Well, part of the problem is no one uses the word _rager_ anymore. I’d have to invite the youth at large from like, 2010. Or maybe super far back, like the 90s.”

Peter hears Mr. Stark snort at that, then few moments later the burble of the coffee machine starting up - the percolator, not the fancy espresso one. He’s pretty sure he can still make out the sound of them still kissing, just underneath it. 

It’s not lost on Peter that they could’ve switched places. 

Right at this moment, Peter could’ve been the one standing in the kitchen, with Tony making fun of his hair and kissing him while they wait for the coffee to brew.

Their coffee. Like their shared bedroom, and joint grocery list. Like Tony knowing what Pete’s hair looks like when he first wakes up in the morning, and Pete not seeming to care if it looks stupid.

Peter thunks his head back against the headboard, then immediately winces when the sound of it is louder than he meant it to be. He freezes, waiting to see if the slip will be noticed. 

Pete might’ve heard, if he was paying attention. He might not have been though, distracted by whatever Mr. Stark is doing with his mouth right now. 

“Do you have to go back to work?” Pete asks, after a minute.

Peter relaxes slightly.

If he didn’t know better, he would assume Pete was asking because he was suggesting they do something else with that time. Peter does know better though; Pete’s asking because he wants to know if Tony is leaving soon so Peter can sneak out of the penthouse unnoticed.

“Not until later,” Tony says. “Rhodes and I have got some stuff we’ve gotta talk over.”

Shit. There goes that idea. Pete might be able to temporarily disable FRIDAY’s constant surveillance when Tony wasn’t around, but it’s not like Pete can do that now with Tony right here and expect him not to notice. And even if Pete can get Tony up to their bedroom, it’s not like Peter can waltz out through the living area to the door without FRIDAY seeing him.

For that matter, if FRIDAY is activated anyway and monitoring security, she’s probably already well aware that Peter’s in the guest room right now. Peter sucks in a breath, resisting the urge to curse.

“Um... FRIDAY?” he whispers instead.

“Yes, Peter?”

“Can you, um, open the window for me? And the one down in the lab too?”

“Of course.”

Peter blows out a breath. He might not be as screwed as he thought. The easy-won success spurs him to push his luck a little bit further - 

“Can you also not tell Mr. Stark I was here?”

“My protocols do not allow me to withhold information from Mr. Stark,” FRIDAY says and Peter’s heart drops. “If he asks.”

“So… if he doesn’t ask?”

“Then your secret is safe with me.” 

Peter feels like if FRIDAY had the capacity to wink at him, she would be doing that right now. “Okay. Thanks, Fri.”

Peter slips out of bed, pulling on his clothes as quickly and quietly as he can. With the window open, the sound of whatever Pete and Tony might be up to in the kitchen is drowned out by the wind rushing past the tower outside. 

Peter is half glad, half disappointed at that; but he doesn’t let himself linger around thinking about it. 

Without looking back, Peter levers himself outside and swings down a level, landing in a crouch on the floor of the lab. Physically, it takes mere seconds and the effort is next to nothing compared to his usual swinging around, but his heart is pounding in his chest nonetheless.

Mr. Stark finding out had always been a possibility, but hanging out with Pete it always seemed really remote. It feels a lot less remote now, knowing that a single off-hand question to FRIDAY was all that stood between their secret and Mr. Stark’s reaction, whatever that might be.

Peter makes a quick stop in the bathroom to attempt to tame his hair and then takes the elevator downstairs, doing his best to pretend like this is a perfectly normal morning.

*

Peter wonders, sometimes, how things might have gone if he hadn’t faded away on Titan. If he’d still been there standing among the ashes with Mr. Stark and Nebula. Intellectually, he knows it doesn’t matter, not really, since that’s not what happened. He also knows that even if he had survived the snap, all it probably would’ve meant was that the food and water would’ve run out that much faster on the ship; that him surviving would’ve only meant that Mr. Stark and Nebula wouldn’t have made it back to Earth.

Dr. Strange had been right - there was only one way it all worked out, and that way meant Mr. Stark and Nebula had to make it back to Earth, so Mr. Stark would be around to help the others figure out time travel, so Nebula would be exactly where she needed to be on that battlefield to steal the stones, to snap her fingers. To save the whole universe.

Peter surviving Titan put all of that in jeopardy.

It doesn’t stop him from thinking about it, though. If they could have made it back to Earth. If Peter had raced back to his and May’s apartment, only to find it empty.

It’s what he’s thinking about in the lab the following Wednesday when Mr. Stark shows up. 

Or rather, he’s making himself think about it because it’s the only way to keep himself sufficiently distracted from thinking about Mr. Stark and Pete making out in the kitchen while Peter listened from the guest bedroom like a giant creep.

“Out with it, kid,” Mr. Stark says. “You know I don’t like the whole quiet thing from you.”

“Huh?”

“I can practically see the wheels turning in that head of yours. Is this a new web formula thing, or are you pondering the meaning of life? Because one of those things I can help with, the other not so much.”

“Oh. Um, no. I was just thinking about how things might have been different, if I hadn’t - you know. If I’d made it back from Titan.”

Mr. Stark doesn’t react right away, except that his hand tightens around the stylus he’s holding. “You did make it back from Titan,” he says.

“No, I know. I meant, like, if I hadn’t faded. If I’d been around for those two years in between.”

“So, don’t take this the wrong way but I’m glad you weren’t.”

Peter’s not sure what way he’s supposed to take that, but something of his reaction must show on his face.

“Hey - what did I literally just say about not taking it the wrong way? I know the grass always looks greener and all that crap, but those two years sucked it pretty hard. I’m not saying I’m glad you weren’t around, I’m saying I’m glad you didn’t have to go through it.”

“I know that,” Peter says. He’s pushing it. He knows he is, and can’t stop himself. “Doesn’t mean I don’t think about it sometimes though. Like, May would’ve been gone, but I guess I could’ve stayed in our apartment still. And people probably needed a friendly neighborhood Spider-Man then more than ever - ” 

Mr. Stark drops the stylus on the lab table, and rubs his hand across his forehead. Peter stops talking.

“You really think that if I managed to bring you back from Titan I would’ve ever let you out of my sight again?”

Peter shrugs. “You do now.”

Mr. Stark looks up at him. Really looks, not the kind of quick sidelong glances Peter has gotten used to over the past few months. He can see the man’s jaw tighten, his throat working like the words are forming and reforming there, until they finally compile into something acceptable.

“I do, yes, because despite evidence to the contrary I do actually recognize that tracking your every move isn’t a healthy coping mechanism, and also that it would probably violate that little old right to privacy chestnut.”

“...Probably?” Peter asks, raising his eyebrows.

“Speaking on a grand scale, this is pretty big progress for me. Don’t push it, kid.”

*

As far as pronouncements of affection go, _I wouldn’t ever let you leave my sight,_ isn’t much of one. If Mr. Stark had said something like that to Peter three years ago he definitely would’ve taken it as an insult, like Mr. Stark didn’t trust Peter to take care of himself out on patrol. 

Now though, Peter likes it. A lot.

Not the kind of stalker-y part, but the part where Mr. Stark seemed to take it as a given that Peter would have stayed with him, like the way Pete does now.

Peter can remember being five and asking May and Ben over and over who he would live with if they died too. It’s probably not the kind of question most five year olds would ask, but to Peter it had been absolutely essential to know the answer. 

Back then May’s parents had still been alive - Peter hadn’t known them very well, but they’d been nice enough, he guessed, on the weekends when May and Ben had taken him on the train out to Long Island to visit every so often.

Anyway, they had been the answer to Peter’s question. They had a spare room they could clear out that could be his, and a yard he could play in, and he’d probably have to go to a different school but that would be okay because the teachers were all really nice.

“Well don’t make it sound too nice, or he won’t want to come back home with us,” Ben had joked.

The adults had all chuckled, and even as young as he was Peter had realized that it was awkward. He gets now that the whole thing was probably kind of morbid for a five year old to keep asking, but May and Ben had both done their best to answer his questions without making him feel weird for wanting to know. 

When they’d lost Ben, Peter hadn’t gone spiralling into the same loop of questions like he had when he was little, but only because they’d been drowned out by so many other questions - and doubts, and guilt, and overwhelming sensory input; all hitting at the same time.

The uncertainty had never really left him, though. 

He figures it must be inescapable mark of losing both parents pretty young. Ned never seemed to worry about that kind of thing - most kids probably grow up thinking it’s unthinkable, he guesses. Peter had grown up knowing otherwise.

In any case, it’s something that Pete seems to get, even if it’s not in quite the same way.

Peter can remember how hollowed-out he’d felt, looking around the empty bedroom that Pete had tried to pass for his own, the first time Pete had taken him up to the penthouse. Having a place to stay was important, sure, but an empty room with a borrowed bed wasn’t home - not the same way his parents’ apartment had been home, or the way May and Ben had rearranged their lives to welcome Peter into theirs, later on. 

Pete wasn’t just a guest at the penthouse. It was home to him, and his presence there was sort of proof in an of itself that Mr. Stark must have meant what he said.

*

The next time they meet up, Peter pulls out Ben’s old clippers, plunking them down on the concrete roof between them with a decisiveness he doesn’t entirely feel.

Pete raises an eyebrow. “Do I want to ask what those are for?”

“My hair. You know, ‘cause it’s longer than yours.”

“Uh, no they’re not.”

“Well, I mean I brought some scissors too, but I don’t think - ”

“Let me stop you right there, dude. I don’t know how to cut hair and neither do you. Tony’s definitely gonna notice the difference if he comes home tomorrow and you look like you lost a fight with a paper shredder.” Pete picks up the clippers and holds them out to Peter. “I have cash. We’re taking you to an actual barber shop.”

Oh. Yeah, that’s probably a safer bet.

“...Unless you’re changing your mind?” Pete asks.

Peter shakes his head. He’s spent way too much time thinking about it to back out now. He’s never going to be able to let the idea go until he knows what it’s like - really like, not just reliving a memory - to stand in Pete’s shoes.

“Then let’s go.”

They end up taking the subway to a hole-in-the-wall type place down in Brooklyn that has pretty good reviews. The stylist - Steph, flashes a grin when Peter gestures to Pete and explains what he wants. 

“Uh huh,” she says, obviously caught onto the very basic premise of their plan. “Should I be asking what this is for?”

“Probably not,” Pete answers, with a wink. “Plausible deniability.”

Steph clips a cape around Peter’s neck and threads her fingers through his hair, fluffing it out to examine the length and cut. 

“I’m guessing you two pull this sort of thing pretty often, huh?”

“First time, actually,” Peter replies.

She raises an eyebrow at him in the mirror. “Really?”

“Yeah, really.”

“We’re very good,” Pete pipes in, all butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth, in a way that’s not at all convincing. 

Steph leans down, meeting Peter’s eyes in the mirror. “Why am I getting the impression that he’s the troublemaker of the two of you?”

“Actually, everything I know about troublemaking I learned from him,” Pete says.

Peter bites his lips together, trying not to laugh. It is, technically, true. Well, sort of. Peter’s pretty sure Tony’s influence has at least something to do with some of Pete’s more brazen impulses.

Peter gives Steph his best innocent look via the mirror in front of them. 

She doesn’t look like she buys it.

All told, the actual haircut doesn’t take very long. Steph has Pete sit in the next chair over, occasionally stepping over to fuss with his hair to check her progress on Peter against their goal.

Pete pays her in cash, and she wishes them luck.

*

“Haircut?” May asks, barely five minutes after he makes it through the door.

“Oh, yeah. It was getting a little long.” He tries to make it sound as casual as he can.

She tilts her head to the side, looking him over. 

“It looks good.”

One hurdle down. Only about a million more to go.

*

Peter can barely pay attention in class the next day. It feels just a little bit like the old days, that first year when he’d count down the hours and minutes at school until he was free to pull on his suit and have free run of the whole city.

“You’re coming over later, right?” Peter asks Ned between classes.

“Duh, of course.”

“Good.”

That means Pete’ll have Ned around as a wingman to smooth over any rough patches, not that Peter really expects any, but just in case. Plus it means Pete will get to spend some time with both of them, so it’s a double bonus.

Peter only wishes he had the same option, but it’s not like he can show up to the penthouse with a friend in tow and expect Mr. Stark ( _Tony_ ) not to notice.

“It’s gonna be fine. You guys are literally identical, May’s not going to suspect anything,” Ned says, apparently catching on to Peter’s nerves. As far as Ned knows, Peter is just spending the night living the high life in the penthouse - nothing to be nervous about there. 

“Although I still think it’d be easier if you both just told everyone what was going on,” Ned adds.

Yeah, definitely not.

*

Peter races home the moment the bell rings, only to find Pete waiting for him in his bedroom.

“You should probably keep your bedroom window locked, dude,” Pete says. “Anyone could just climb in.”

Peter shrugs. “Sometimes I’m the one that needs to climb in.”

“A motion sensor then, or something at least.”

“If you want to rig up a motion sensor tonight, go nuts.”

“I might.”

Peter kicks off his sneakers and then pulls off his shirt, tossing it over towards Pete. Pete drops the shirt on the bed and stands up, pulling Peter in for a quick kiss. 

“Stop being nervous,” he says.

“I’m not nervous.”

“Yes you are. It’s okay, but you’re gonna drive yourself nuts if you don’t calm down.”

Peter shifts on his feet. “Are you nervous? About meeting May?”

“A little bit, yeah. But I’m excited too.”

Now that he’s looking for it, Peter can see the tiniest hints of nerves in Pete’s expression too. 

They both strip down and swap clothing. It feels a little strange, pulling on clothing still warm from Pete’s body, not to mention pulling on someone else’s socks and underwear. 

“Mind meld time?” Peter asks.

“Yeah.”

They both put on their glasses, trading a round of memories back and forth of the previous few days. Pete will know that May’s blue sweater is hanging on the back of the door in the bathroom, and Peter will remember that Tony wanted to take another look at the lab design for the new compound. Hopefully any slips beyond that can be marked down to simple forgetfulness. 

Ned shows up not long after that, bearing an external harddrive full of movies to watch and a bag full of movie night snacks. He hugs Peter like he hasn’t seen him in weeks, until Peter realizes - right, he’s in Pete’s clothes.

“Good to see you too, buddy, but you saw me like two hours ago.”

“Oh. Well I guess you guys pass the first test then, huh?”

Ned pats Peter’s back and then lets go, turning to wrap Pete in a bearhug instead. Pete laughs as he returns it in kind.

Pete and Ned end up sitting on the bed, digging through the bag of snacks and discussing movie options, and Peter is hit with a sudden overwhelming urge to stay. How awesome would it be to spend the night just hanging out with both of them, watching movies and laughing about that dumb thing Flash did in Calc last week?

“One last thing, right?” Pete says, seeming to notice Peter’s hesitation.

Pete rolls up his sleeve just enough to unclasp his watch, which is a lot heavier than it looks when it drops into Peter’s palm.

“Is that - ?” Ned asks.

“Nano-tech casing for my suit, yeah.”

Peter closes his fingers around the watch. He should put it on, can’t believe they hadn’t thought to test swapping suits until now - what if it didn’t work? Putting on the watch feels more personal than swapping clothes had been, somehow.

“You sure?” he asks Pete.

“Yeah. I mean, we have to, don’t we? You’re leaving yours here, and it’s not like I’m gonna let you go without something. Besides, Tony would definitely notice.”

“How do I...?”

“Same as your nanotech shooters, cross your wrists and flip your hands over.”

Peter latches the watch around his wrist and activates the suit, nanotech racing across his body as the suit encases him. He breathes a sigh of relief. It may not be _his_ suit, but everything about it is comfortably familiar nonetheless.

“That will literally never stop being cool,” Ned says.

“Right?” Pete echoes. 

“Okay,” Peter says, deactivating the suit so he’s back in his (Pete’s) street clothes again. “I’m gonna take the subway back to Manhattan, put the suit on, and then swing back to the tower.”

“That’s the plan. Tell Tony I said hi.”

Peter resists the urge to give Pete the finger. So much for being supportive.

“Seriously dude, it’s going to be fine,” Pete says. Okay, that’s a little better.

“Yeah, have fun living in the lap of luxury. Wait, can you order room service at the tower, like at a hotel?”

“I’m pretty sure FRIDAY would resent being referred to as room service, but yeah, you can order pretty much anything you want.” Pete pauses. “Please promise me you’re not gonna try to order a motorcycle, though. I’m not explaining that to Tony when I get back.”

“Aw, come on, you really think he’d be mad?” Peter says.

“Well... no, probably not. You might want to get going though, if you don’t want to be here when May gets home.”

Peter glances down at Pete’s watch. _His_ watch. He’s right, it’s past time to get moving.

“Wish me luck?” Peter says.

Ned looks between the two of them, perplexed.

“You’re not gonna need luck,” Pete replies.

If Ned wasn’t in the room, Peter would’ve been tempted to lean down for one last kiss, but since he is, Peter has to settle for a quick wave and what he hopes resembles a smile but feels like it probably came off more like a grimace.

*

Peter isn’t nearly as confident about this whole thing as Pete and Ned are, but standing there arguing about it isn’t going to accomplish much. Neither is pacing around outside of the subway station, or wasting time swinging around Manhattan in Pete’s suit. He tells himself it’s because he wants to see how different the suit is from his own, but other than a few minor tweaks to the display layout it’s pretty much exactly the same. Well, that and the color.

A few people wave to Peter while he’s out. Not many; it’s getting close to rush hour and most everyone seems to be focused on their commute. He helps a lady who’s on crutches when she drops her bag in the street, and then maybe sort of moves a double-parked car over a few feet to help out another guy who’s been blocked in. 

He leaves a strongly worded note for the double-parked guy.

He also decides he’s spent enough time futzing around. It’s not that he doesn’t want to go to the tower; it’s just last minute nerves. He can’t help thinking that Mr. Stark is going to take one look at him and just… know.

And on one hand, how could he not? He literally _made_ Pete. It would be like Peter slapping together a homebrew Iron Man suit and expecting Tony not to know the difference. Not that Pete was like an Iron Man suit, but whatever.

Then again, how _could_ he know? Peter and Pete are genetically identical; literally picture perfect. Even Stark phone face recognition couldn’t tell them apart - they’d tried it. 

Peter climbs up the tower and swings up over the balcony. 

The penthouse is empty and quiet as he heads inside, deactivating the suit. It’s weird to be here without Pete. 

“Hey, FRI,” Peter tries.

“Welcome, Peter. How was your patrol?”

“Good. Yeah, pretty good. Not a lot going on though.”

“I’m glad to hear it.”

“Um, you don’t know when Mr. Stark is getting home do you?” _Mr. Stark_. Shit. Peter’s already messing up.

“I don’t have a current ETA. Would you like me to ask?”

“No! No, I mean that’s okay. You don’t have to do that. Please don’t do that.”

“Okay.”

Peter fiddles with the watch as he looks around the living area, wondering what he should do. At some point he should probably order food, but it’s still pretty early for that, and he’s not sure if maybe he should wait until Mr. Stark - _Tony,_ gets home. 

He’s pretty sure Pete doesn’t usually wait, at least based on the few scattered recent memories he’s shared. 

Maybe swinging around some more would help burn off the extra nerves, but then again he’s already done that and all it’s accomplished it is a very slight, satisfying soreness in his shoulders, and feeling like he probably needs a shower.

Actually, a shower sounds awesome, come to think of it.

Peter tosses his clothes in the laundry basket, spends a while messing with the various body jets and steam settings just because he can. The shower itself smells like Tony, and Pete too for that matter; the lingering scent of body wash and shampoo in the air, growing ten times more intense when Peter actually lathers up. He doesn’t really even think about it when his hand dips down to wrap around his dick. 

As fas as ways to relieve tension go, this ranked way above going back out to swing around Manhattan some more.

He even laughs a little when he comes, giddy and maybe a little bit hysterical. He just came in Tony Stark’s shower. And not like, his guest bedroom shower either; no. His _personal_ shower. That he uses on a daily basis, standing right here, scrubbing this same soap over his chest and thighs.

Peter dries himself off and finger combs his hair into some semblance of order. He hasn’t quite adjusted to the shorter length yet, but it feels pretty good. He spends a while standing in front of the vanity, trying to look at himself and see Pete instead. It’s sort of like one of those magic eye puzzles - the really tough ones you can only get by looking at side-on, for a split second it’ll be really clear, and then you blink and it’s gone completely. He grins at himself, which helps the illusion a lot, and then winks. 

“You’re not gonna need luck,” he tells himself, doing his best to mimic Pete’s easy confidence.   
  
  
  



End file.
